She was not sure just when it was that she first started noticing the birds. It must have been very shortly after her “marriage,” when she came to live with her new husband in the little, weather-beaten shack by the shores of the great Ocean. It was a barren, windswept place, where the restless, unceasing roar of the waves rolling towards the shore only emphasised its desolation and loneliness. A few scattered coconut palms grew here and there, and edging the shoreline was a dense belt of mangroves; those sturdy defenders of fragile shores, their tangled buttresses of roots anchored firmly in earth and water, their green leaves shining in the sun or silhouetted in dark clusters against the night sky. There was no romantic white sand beach here, only soggy mud banks, and when the tide was low, the long, dark, glistening mudflats stretched outwards to the sea, treacherous; pungent of the wet mud, rotting vegetation, salt water and other once-living things that had washed ashore with the incoming tide. Beyond this lay the muddy, coastal waters of the ocean upon which her husband, a fisherman, plied his trade from a small fishing boat he owned jointly with two of his brothers, Allan and Ash. Descending from a long line of fisher people, it was the only skill he knew. That, and how to drink rum with the money he made from fishing and also, how to beat his wife when he drank the rum.
She was just fourteen years old when her father married her off to the man she now called her husband. Poor and almost illiterate, coming from a long line of poor and increasingly illiterate people, it seemed her destiny was to continue the family tradition of poverty and illiteracy on to an indefinite end. Her family must have been glad to get rid of her since fourteen was, for a girl child in those parts, considered a ripe age for either marriage or the potential to bring trouble home to her parents. With this concern ever before his eyes, transferring the burden of the upkeep of his daughter and any future “problems” she might be inclined to bring into the family to another man was the only reasonable solution open to her father. Her father had met his future son-in-law by chance one day, during one of frequent excursions to a rum shop in the village. The man had come from the coast with his brothers to sell off a fair catch of fish to the fish vendors at the market there, and later that afternoon, with the fish sold and money in his pocket, he was overcome by a burning thirst that he was powerless to deny. He made a quick stop at the nearest establishment to refresh himself and cool his throat. A quick stop that ended up lasting two nights and a day—long after his brothers had left him and returned to the sea. The father ran into him on the second night of his stay. He was liquored up to his eyeballs and had long lost track of the number of rounds of drinks he had already bought for the house, surrounded by a close group of new friends all anxiously anticipating the delightful crackle as the seal of each fresh bottle was broken and the corrosive nectar was poured into their eagerly waiting glasses. His friends, delighted with the generosity of their new acquaintance, were applauding everything he did and said and as a result of their adulation, he was feeling like a king surrounded by his adoring subjects. It was sometime during the course of this raucous evening of brotherly love and friendship, the kind that blossoms so richly in the company of the inebriated, that he let fall a remark that at a time like this, the only thing missing in his life was a wife to keep him warm at night. Her father’s ears perked up. A man of such obvious wealth and generosity, who also happened to be the co-owner of a fishing trawler was definitely a step up the social ladder and worthy of his attention. He accosted the man soon afterward and explained— as eloquently as was possible under the circumstances— that if this distinguished gentleman was indeed serious about acquiring a wife then he need not deprive himself of that commodity any longer since he, the father, had a daughter who was of marriageable age and since she was both docile and willing to work as hard as any man— and not at all ugly in the bargain— he was sure that the man could not find better anywhere else. The deal was sealed with a drunken hug, a ribald ditty on the charms of the fairer sex and a bottle of the finest rum the establishment had on offer. That very same night, the man accompanied the father home to meet his future wife, who may be forgiven for being struck dumb by the news that this charming stranger who reeked of booze, fish and unwashed clothing, had come to claim her hand in marriage.
Her silence was taken for granted as consent; no one had actually thought to ask her opinion on the matter anyway. Their courtship was brief as the man could only give her his attention long enough to leer at her suggestively before collapsing onto a bench in the yard to sleep off the combined results of the Five Year Old rum and vodka that he had consumed in tandem. He was by this time more than ready to go home since his financial resources were now sadly depleted and wisdom acquired from past experiences made him aware that, with nothing to offer but empty pockets, the love of his new found friends would not last the duration of a hangover. The “wedding”, which merely consisted of the father officially handing the girl over to the man in the presence of another man who once served as a deacon of a local church and a few curious neighbours, was held the very next morning. At the conclusion of the short ceremony, everyone present drank a toast to the new couple and shortly afterward, the girl packed her few belongings and left with her new king for his castle, a ramshackle, one-room hut on a badly neglected plot of land overlooking long, dark gray mudflats at the edge of the ocean. She had felt a stirring of excitement when she first arrived, and since she had never known what comfort or style meant, was not at all put off by the condition of the place. Her expectations were not high but at least she felt a hope that here, if she applied herself industriously, was an opportunity for a better and more independent life than the one she had known at home.
Alas for great expectations, all hopes she might have had were dashed after her wedding night. Her husband had disappeared soon after dropping her off at the shack and did not return home until well after dark, drunk as a lord. She had tried to put together a dinner of sorts from the odds and ends she found in the lean-to kitchen- he hadn’t bothered to check if she needed anything before leaving- and he had sworn furiously at her over the poor quality of the meal she had placed before him and struck her a stinging blow to the face for falling short in this wifely function. Later, he had taken her in bed with the selfish brutality of a man who did not consider a woman as a being with feelings and afterwards, rolling away from her torn and bleeding body, muttered something about “yuh betta go outside and clean yuh self up gal”, before promptly falling asleep.
She washed the blood away with rank, cold water taken from a weather-beaten, plastic bucket that stood by the back door. Afterwards, she sat a long time in the doorway, numb to the cold night air that blew over her naked body, looking with unseeing eyes at the dark, gently swaying tops of the mangroves silhouetted against the bleak sky. Her shattered soul lay at the bottom of a cold, dark abyss through which no light of warmth or hope could ever penetrate.
It must have been shortly after this that she first started noticing the birds. Large, elegant looking birds, known locally as ‘white cranes’. They came to roost in a nearby cluster of mangroves every evening. In flocks they came, scores of them filling the evening sky, wheeling in at dusk and alighting on the tops of the mangroves, balancing on long, thin legs like graceful dancers. Ghostly white. Silently aloof. Otherworldly in their solemn perch. She found herself curiously drawn to these common, beautiful birds, falling into the habit of looking out for them when they came in at dusk and rising early to see them leave at dawn. Borne aloft by their gleaming wings, they rode the currents of ocean breezes and came and went as they pleased. She watched them as they came and went day after day and a deep and painful longing began to take root in her heart. Although it was unidentifiable at first, she gradually came to realise that due to the awful reality of her life she had begun to mentally withdraw herself, deep within her spirit she had started connecting with the birds and a fierce longing to be free and weightless like them, to rise up into the air and soar away to some distant place began to slowly consume her. She also began talking to them whenever she was alone in the evenings – which was more often than not – pouring out her heart and misery, convincing herself that they listened and sympathised with her. Weeks that grew into months passed in this way and with each day, as her spiritual affinity to the birds grew more powerful, she began to imagine that her body had become an earth-bound prison, a dark, iron barred cage within which her soul fluttered and thrashed, desperate for a way out.
One evening, observing them from the window, it suddenly struck her that the birds seemed to always face her direction when they came in to roost. She was not sure if it had always been that way or if it was something they had recently started doing, but whenever they settled in on their perches on the swaying mangroves, their heads were turned in the direction of her shack. ‘They are watching me,’ she thought. ‘Can they hear what I think? What I feel? Do they know how I love them? How I envy them?’ She stared straight at them and willed them to hear her thoughts. She felt their combined gaze, like a ray of heat, envelope her. A whisper of hopelessness formed on her lips, “Take me with you, take me with you…take …me…with…you!” The birds continued to burn her with their unwavering stares.
She moved away from the window and the strong, silent gaze of the birds. Tacked to the wall of the shack was part of a mirror that had once upon a time adorned a fancy vanity or wardrobe. It was made of thick glass and when it was whole it must have been of a very good and expensive quality, but now all that was left was a fragment just large enough for the viewer to see most of his or her face when looking into it. Her husband used it on the rare occasions that he shaved. She rarely looked into it. Since she never went anywhere, there was no need to concern herself with her appearance and she was afraid of what her husband might think if he ever saw her fixing her hair or examining her face in a looking glass. He had already assured her that he would soon “fix her face for her” if she ever got any fancy ideas about it. She usually had little inclination to want to look into the mirror anyway; she did not want to see the desperate, hopeless eyes of a lost girl gazing back at her from the fragment of looking glass. But now she found herself turning to the piece of mirror to take a frank, assessment of herself. What did she really look like? Was she pretty? She did not think so. Her skin was copper coloured from the stamp of her race and the unrelenting sun she spent so much of her day toiling in, helping her husband with his work and her own. Her hair was long and thick and black as the night but it was usually kept out of sight in a tightly wound bun at the back of her head. Now she unbound it and it fell heavily about her shoulders as she ran her fingers through it. Her eyes were deep brown and almond shaped, set above high, prominent cheekbones; her eyebrows were finely marked, ebony wings slanting up across her forehead with just a few stray hairs on the plain between her brows. Her nose was small and straight with slightly flaring nostrils. She could never comprehend or acknowledge her own beauty for she had been taught from childhood that she had no value and believed it wholeheartedly.
She turned away and gazed out the window again. The birds seemed to be watching her even more intently and air around her thickened imperceptibly. Something silent and unseen was pulling her forward and her desire to go to them suddenly became overwhelming. Trancelike, she moved towards the doorway, stepping down the three half-rotted, wooden steps that led from the house to the yard that she tried, in her spare time, to weed and keep as clean as it was possible. There had been many days of sun and the hard baked earth was veined with tiny cracks and larger fissures around her bare feet, while the persistent weeds and scraggy grass were yellowish and brittle. She made her way down the narrow track, made a gap through the mangroves that led down the seashore to the small jetty, where the fishing boat was usually moored after a trip. The birds seemed very close to her now. Perched at the tops of their trees, they were staring straight down at her and there was a curious feeling that the physical planes of distance between her and them were evaporating. She could clearly see their amber eyes looking right into her own. She stopped. She could go no further. She stretched her arms up to them.
“Free me”, the hoarse whisper ripped from her throat and sudden tears welled in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. “Please, please take me with you!”
One very large, snowy white bird stretched his long neck out to her; she had noticed him before because he was the largest and she thought of him as the leader of the flock. His dazzling wings opened out and as if on a signal, the entire flock suddenly left their roost and flew straight at her. Too stunned to react, she stood still as the storm of birds surrounded her, their swift circling bringing them closer and closer until all she could see was a dizzying whirlwind of white wings and yellow eyes. She was caught in a vortex, a living tornado of birds that flew so close she felt the touch of feathers as their wings grazed against her and the air churned by their powerful wings blew over her body and fanned her hair wildly around her face. There was no sound save the distant rush of the ocean waves and the swish of wings beating the air, and in her shock and confusion, she felt they were attacking her. Terrified of the sharp bills so close to her face and eyes, she sought a way out. The cruel looking bills did not touch her but the birds did not give way and she threw her arms up to cover her face. Suddenly she felt something rising within her, something new and powerful and exhilarating. Rising out of the dark abyss she felt as if, body and soul, she was being transported to the very top of the world. She felt dizzy; a sensation as if the ground was falling away beneath her feet went through her and she felt sure that somehow the whirling birds had caught her and borne her up into the air with them. She felt their wild presence all around her and one particular presence was stronger than the rest. Focusing her attention, she peered through the flurry of wings. A pair of startling golden eyes gazed back at her from beyond the hundreds of other bird eyes whirling around her and in them, she thought there was something beckoning to her. She did not see face or form but the eyes were bright and glowing and warmth seemed to radiate from them towards her.
She closed her eyes against this impossible vision and when she opened them again the eyes were gone. She felt unbound, as if her body, her entire being, had been torn apart and put together again in a new and different way, she felt alive, painfully and gloriously alive. Pin pricks of sensation rippled like waves of electricity over her skin and as if suspended at a great height. As she beheld far below a beautiful country spread out before her, she saw the sparkle and shimmer of water, and plains of tawny grass bordering dark forests. She was facing the west and the sinking sun cast a wonderful and mystical light that was both soft and rich over this strange land and she knew she wanted more than anything to go there. In her eagerness she took a step forward and gasped at the feeling that she had stepped off the top of a mountain and was plunging back to earth from a dizzying height. “Nooooooo!” she screamed, as a white mist rose up and closed around her.
When she opened her eyes the birds had disappeared and the place had gone dark. She was lying on the ground on the same spot she had been standing when the birds had swooped down. She had no idea how long she had been lying there but the thin, gleaming crescent of the new moon was hanging low in the western sky, so it must have been a while. The mangroves and coconut trees swayed and murmured in a chilly night breeze and not a speck of white showed among their branches. She was keenly aware of the sharp bite and rankness of the ocean air, the faint sickly light cast by the new moon, the never ending, melancholy murmuring of waves rolling in from the ocean and the deep despair and cold emptiness of being completely alone. Close beside her lay a single pure white feather. She slowly sat up and buried her face in her arms as a wave of disconsolation washed over her. “Why you leave me here?” she sobbed. “I don’t want to go back!”
Afterwards, she made her way back to the sad little shack and threw herself on the old torn mattress with its thin, faded sheets that she and her husband slept on. Through the window opening she stared at the undulating tops of the mangroves. The birds did not come back that night. Neither did her husband.
Her husband had staggered home very late the next morning when the sun was high in the sky and she had finished eating the simple breakfast she had prepared, leaving his covered on the table. His fishing partners had left without him and he was in foul mood. Since she was the nearest available thing on which he could safely vent his anger, by midday she was nursing a cut lip and black eye and an uncontrollable rage, despair and something else she could not name were welling unchecked in her heart, though hidden behind lowered eyes and a bent head.
Her longing for the birds now permeated every aspect of her being. She barely focused enough to get through the days and nights that now seemed to meld together without any real borders of light or darkness to separate them; the world around her was the colour of a perpetual twilight. All her focus was on the silent and bare tops of the mangroves where she gazed long into the night, willing the white shapes to appear, and to which she looked long before the light of the dawn had even begun to silver the eastern sky. The birds did not come.
She no longer felt the blows from her husband nor heard his cussing. She continued to work, to help her husband and his brothers prepare the fish for the market when they came in, to cook, clean and do everything she had done since coming to this barren shore of misery. When her husband came home reeking of rum and demanded her body with the same uncaring roughness he always took her with, she closed her eyes and saw in her mind’s eye the warm golden eyes she had glimpsed only once through a whirlwind of feathers but which her heart knew so well, and so for a while time passed.
Evening had fallen, the light was still bright but faint streaks of crimson were beginning to show in the soft aquamarine sky. She went out into the bare yard and, closing her eyes, stretched her arms out on either side. The wind lifted her unbound hair and she thought of what it would be like to shed the dead weight of her body, to leave the solid earth and soar into the evening sky towards the dying sun.
She had not heard them arrive but when she opened her eyes they were there, standing like sentinels from another world, heads sunk into their breasts. The largest of them stood apart from the others. She took an eager step forward and suddenly the harsh voice of her husband was grating in her ears.
“Gal, wah yuh doin out hay like yuh head ain’t good! Yuh ain’t got things to do in de house?” A stinging blow to her cheek and she fell to the ground. Lifting her head she stared into his eyes, one hand cupping the cheek throbbing from the savage cuff he had dealt her. The fire raging in her breast leaped fleetingly into her eyes and what he saw there unsettled him. He blinked uneasily and shifting his gaze from her face, his eyes fell on the motionless white birds that were standing silently looking on, seeing everything. A feeling of apprehension swam through the fog of his drunkenness and picking up a piece of wood that lay at his feet, he hurled it with all his might at that one bird which stood apart from the rest, but the creature avoided the missile with a graceful and almost disdainful step aside. Swearing at the “Blasted birds around dis place”, her husband seized her arm and dragged her to her feet. Snarling at her to get his dinner, he shoved her in the direction of the house.
As the last rays of the sinking sun streaked the sky with blood, the round, luminous, pale-golden orb of a full moon rose majestically in the eastern sky. Her husband had eaten his dinner with gusto and afterwards taken his liberty with her body before finally succumbing to the alcohol coursing through his veins. She lay beside him feeling nothing; her eyes fixed upon the tops of the mangroves, now silvered by cold moonlight where the birds stood, their snowy plumage glowing and ghostly under the moon. They had observed everything.
She sensed the One before she ever saw him; she felt the powerful beat of his wings pulsing in her heart even before he alighted on the window sill, then she saw the others, even more than had been there in the evening. A turbulent sea of silvery white, they flew around the house. Hundreds of them circling, rising and dipping, and the swish of their wings filled the air around and gushed into the small house like the wind of a gathering storm. She was aware of nothing but the sound of the circling birds and the steady golden gaze of one. She could not move, her body was like lead but the longing in her heart welled to near breaking point. “Don’t leave me here!” she breathed, not knowing or caring if her husband heard her. “Please, please, don’t leave me, take me with you! Oh! Please…please…please!”
Suddenly she felt the same feeling that had come over her on that evening of the new moon, as if something was rising in her, like a rush of energy bursting out of the pores of her skin. Suddenly she knew what was happening and the sensation of exhilaration and light was so intense it hurt, like a crystal knife slicing through her, cutting her free. She rose noiselessly from the bed and felt herself gliding towards the window and she saw him, not as a bird anymore but the image of a tall and beautiful man, standing just inside the room clothed in white and bathed in a luminous glow, silvered hair throwing off sparks in the moonlight that poured through the window, his face was noble and his golden eyes were warm and beckoning. She reached out her hand to him and he took it and together they turned to the window. He let go of her and he was not a man anymore but a bird again that flew out of the window to join the others. She stood for a moment at the window looking back at her husband, who slept on oblivious to what was happening. She briefly wondered what he would do when he awoke the next morning. Would he understand? Would he feel any regret or remorse for the way he had treated her? Would he blame himself, or feel sorrow, or relief? She also thought of her own family who had sold her into this life. She looked down at her still body, now empty and hollow, lying next to him, its glazed and sightless eyes still staring fixedly at the window, beyond longing now, beyond pain and despair ever again, but with a faint and mysterious smile frozen on its bruised and beautiful face, and she smiled back. Did she even care what happened tomorrow? He could toss her empty shell into the ocean for all it mattered to her. She was free.
She turned her back on the lifeless thing and the sleeping man lying on the dirty old mattress on the floor. She stretched out her long, graceful neck and raised her arms and the white feathers of her wings glowed pure and dazzling in the moonlight as she flew out of the window. She flew out to join him as the entire flock wheeled in formation and turned their faces towards the west, where the setting sun had long since vanished.
The cold moonlight continued to pour in through the open window, the man slept on. The shell of the girl grew colder and stiffer as the moon went down and when the first rays of the morning sun crept timidly through the window, the shell was beyond all warmth.
The birds never came back.
