She walked away. I stayed where I was. After a moment I picked up a stick and tentatively prodded at the dead bird. It didn’t move.
It was on its back, and it looked sadder that way. I wanted to turn it over. I poked it again, harder.
It still didn’t budge.
Cody doesn’t mind touching dead things. I do. But the hummingbird was so small, only as long as my finger. And it was beautiful, with its black beak and the red spot at its throat and those tiny feathers, more like scales. So I picked it up.
“Holy crap,” I whispered.
It was heavy. Not heavy like maybe a bigger bird would have been, a sparrow or chickadee, but heavy, like a rock. Not even a rock—it reminded me of one of those weights you see hanging from an old clock, those metal things shaped like pinecones or acorns, but when you touch them they feel heavy as a bowling ball, only much smaller.
The hummingbird was like that—so little I could cradle it in my cupped palm, and already cold. I guessed that rigor mortis had set in, the way it does when you hang a deer. Very gently I touched the bird’s wing. I even tried to wiggle it, but the wing didn’t move.
So I turned the bird in my cupped palm onto its stomach. Its tiny legs were folded up like a fly’s, its eyes dull. Its body didn’t feel soft, like feathers. It felt hard, solid as granite; and cold.
But it looked exactly like a live hummingbird, emerald green where the sun hit it, beak slightly curved; a band of white under the red throat. I ran my finger along its beak, then swore.
“What the frig?”
A bright red bead welled up where the dead bird’s beak had punctured my skin, sharp as a nail.
I sucked my finger, quickly looked to make sure Vala hadn’t seen me. I could just make her out in the distance, moving through the trees. I felt in my pocket till I found a wadded-up Kleenex, wrapped the hummingbird in it, and very carefully put it into my pocket. Then I hurried after Vala.
We walked back in silence. Only when the skeletal frame of the new house showed brightly through the trees did Vala turn to me.
“You saw the bird?” she asked.
I looked at her uneasily. I was afraid to lie, but even more afraid of what she might do if she knew what was in my pocket.
Before I could reply, she reached to touch the spot on my chin. I felt a flash of aching cold as she stared at me, her dark eyes somber but not unkind.
“I did not mean to hurt it,” she said quietly. “I have never seen a bird like that one, not so close. I was scared. Not scared—startled. My reaction was too fast,” she went on, and her voice was sad. Then she smiled and glanced down at my jeans pocket.
“You took it,” she said.
I turned away, and Vala laughed. In front of the house, Winter looked up from a pile of two-by-sixes.
“Get your butt over here, Justin!” he yelled. “Woman, don’t you go distracting him!”
Vala stuck her tongue out again, then turned back to me. “He knows,” she said matter-of-factly. “But maybe you don’t tell your friend? Or your mother.”
And she walked over to kiss Winter’s sunburned cheek.
I muttered, “Yeah, sure,” then crossed to where I’d left the varnish. Vala stood beside her husband and sighed as she stared at the cloudless sky and the green canopy of trees stretching down to the bay. A few boats under sail moved slowly across the blue water. One was a three-masted schooner with a red-striped mainsaiclass="underline" Thomas Tierney’s yacht.
“So, Vala,” said Winter. He winked at his wife. “You tell Justin your news yet?”
She smiled. “Not yet.” She pulled up the sweatshirt so I could see her stomach sticking out. “Here—”
She beckoned me over, took my hand, and placed it on her stomach. Despite the heat, her hand was icy cold. So was her stomach; but I felt a sudden heat beneath my palm, and then a series of small thumps from inside her belly. I looked at her in surprise.
“It’s the baby!”
“Eg veit,” she said, and laughed. “I know.”
“Now don’t go scaring him off, talking about babies,” said Winter. He put his arm around his wife. “I need him to help me finish this damn house before it snows.”
I went back to varnishing. The truth is, I was glad to have something to do, so I wouldn’t think about what had happened. When I got home that evening I put the hummingbird in a drawer, wrapped in an old T-shirt. For a while I’d look at it every night, after my mother came in to give me a kiss; but after a week or so I almost forgot it was there.
A few days later Cody got back from Bible camp. It was September now. Labor Day had come and gone, and most of the summer people. School started up. Me and Cody were in eighth grade; we were pretty sick of being with the same people since kindergarten, but it was okay. Some days we skated over at Winter’s place after school. It was getting crowded there, with the piles of split firewood and all the stacks of lumber for the new house, and sometimes Winter yelled at us for getting in the way.
But mostly everything was like it usually was, except that Vala was getting more pregnant and everyone was starting to think about winter coming down.
You might not believe that people really worry about snow all the time, but here they do. My mother had already gotten her firewood from Winter back in August, and so had most of his other regular customers. Day by day, the big stacks of split wood dwindled, as Winter hauled them off for delivery.
And day by day the new house got bigger, so that soon it looked less like a kid’s drawing of a stick house and more like a fairy-tale cottage come to life, with a steep roof and lots of windows, some of them square and some of them round, like portholes, and scallop-shaped shingles stained the color of cranberries. I helped with that part, and inside, too, which was great.
Because inside—inside was amazing. Winter did incredible things with wood, everyone knew that. But until then, I had only seen the things he made for money, like furniture, or things he made to be useful, like the cabinets he’d done for my mother.
Now I saw what Winter had done for himself and Vala. And if the outside of the little house looked like a fairy tale, the inside looked like something from a dream.
Winter usually carved from pine, which is a very soft wood. But he’d used oak for the beams, and covered them with faces—wind-faces with their mouths open to blow, foxes and wolves grinning from the corners, dragons and people I didn’t recognize but who Vala said were spirits from Iceland.
“Huldufolk,” she said when I asked about them. “The hidden people.”
But they weren’t hidden here. They were carved on the main beam that went across the living room ceiling, and on the oak posts in each corner, peeking out from carved leaves and vines and branches that made the posts look almost like real trees. There were huldufolk carved into the cupboards, and on benches and cabinets and bookshelves, and even on the headboard that Winter had made from a single slab of chestnut, so highly polished with beeswax that the entire bedroom smelled like honey.
So even though the house looked small from the outside, when you got inside you could get lost, wandering around and looking at all the wonderful carved things. Not just carved so the wood resembled something new, but so that you could see what was inside the wood, knots and whorls turned to eyes and mouths, the grain sanded and stained till it felt soft, the way skin might feel if it grew strong enough to support walls and ceilings and joists, while still managing to remain, somehow, skin, and alive.
It was the most amazing house I’ve ever seen. And maybe the most amazing thing wasn’t that it made me want to live in it, but that after spending hours working on it, I began to feel that the house lived in me, the way the baby lived inside Vala.