The Good Fortune Harvest
“Pull the trigger boy! Pull it!
“I can’t.”
“Honey don’t make him do it, if he doesn’t want to.”
“How’s he going to be a man if he can’t even aim a gun and shoot a goddamn bird out of a tree.”
“I don’t want to Ma,” young Andy had called to her across the field so pathetically. He hopped from one foot to the other as if the ground underneath him was too hot to stand on. He shouted at the sky, “I don’t want to kill no bird.”
“I don’t blame you honey,” my mother yelled back.
“Son, if you don’t pull that trigger right now, you are not going to watch any more of those stupid movies for a month, you hear me?”
Andy bit down hard on his lip, pointed the gun at the dirt, and pulled the trigger. The blast was so loud, he started yelling and ran across the grass into my mother’s arms which were open and waiting. She stroked his head and kissed him softly on his cheeks. Told him what a good boy he was, while my Father spit on the ground and shook his head. Goddamn sissy boy, he called out to him.
Then my Father turned and aimed at the bird and pulled the trigger. The bird fell out of the tree. My Father smiled and grunted out his own approval. I watched this from my bedroom window on the second floor. By the time I got down to the field, the owl lay on the ground under the tree. He wasn’t dead. His human eyes blinked up at me. I went over to him, but my Father screamed at me, “Stupid! Don’t go near it. His beak will rip you apart.”
I have only seen an owl once, close up. That was this one. I never knew their eyes carried so many words in them. My Father stood behind me, a monster. I knew the monster would now kill the owl because he was almost dead anyway and that was the end of it. I went back in the house, too sick to cry. I have forgotten the true color of my Father’s eyes, but even now when I close my own, I cannot help but see the blinking sadness in the brown eyes of that owl. Could he have known his own mortality?