Ornithology
by Wendy Taylor Carlilse
My family was two single sisters who leaned together in the house where I spent my high school years. Mother was notoriously slipsy with the truth which she called candor, notwithstanding it was mostly a pastiche of what she wished had happened, what might have happened, half-truths, lies and how sorry she was that she hadn’t told me sooner. Aunt Bet, a poet, kept to herself. The sisters often disagreed on the family gospels but I was used to a lack of frankness and became convinced I would never get the facts about Grandpa Charlie, who roistered his way to an alcoholic death, Uncle Robbie, who warmed a dedicated stool at the local bar, or my father who was dead, to us for a time, and then later actually dead. What with the lies and the dying and my hazy memory, I have to grab what I can of the past, in this instance, a vivid picture of the man who lived across the street, the one we all called Tommy. In the land of stucco, Tommy’s was wood. When the grownups drove off to jobs, Tommy stayed on the block. In the grey-flannel fifties, Tommy showed up in his carport in his tightly whities with his bathrobe hanging open.
Our block was relentlessly middle-class. Most families had moved here for tropical living, trailed by maids and yard men. Tommy fixed his own car, mowed his lawn and most astonishingly, butchered broiler chickens on a stump in his backyard. We neighbor kids watched, repelled and fascinated, as each headless Leghorn, Easter Egger or Naked Neck danced across the scant grass. The rest of the drama was invisible to us until Tommy dragged out the dented, rusted grill and the over-full platter on Sunday, for a chicken dinner. Tommy kept other birds as well. He always had a caged parakeet hanging in his living room. When one bird disappeared, another would replace it. We kids monitored Tommy, his stump, his headless chickens, the rotation of little green and blue birds. We thought we knew everything about our strange neighbor but nothing beat the day when he strolled out into the porte cochère, bathrobe at half-mast, holding a Budweiser and a Chesterfield, and intoned conspiratorially, “Hey, kids, ya wanna’ see something?” We mosquito-bit, scratched-kneed neighborhood kids, did. Tommy ankled over to his chest freezer, bent down, reached in and plucked out two parakeets, emblems of his fowl archive, their feathers stiff with rime. He held them aloft and crowed, “Beautiful Budgies, ain’t they?”
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks. Find her work in Terrain, Tab, Rattle, About Place, Swimm, and a selection ( which she updates sporadically)at her website www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com
