Yellow Birds

Read Online Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers - Free Book Online Page B

Book: Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers Read Free Book Online
Authors: Kevin Powers
Ads: Link
setting sun had washed out and the last soft hint of pink disappeared behind the city.
    “Good news?” I asked.
    “News, anyway,” he said.
    “What’s up?”
    “My girlfriend’s going to school. Says she figures the best thing is…well, you know.”
    The radio continued to buzz softly. The LT’s voice draped down over our whispers, saying, “They’re good boys. They’ll be ready, Colonel.”
    “Jody’s got your girl?” I asked him.
    “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
    “You all right?”
    “Yeah. Don’t matter, I guess.”
    “Sure?”
    There was no sound between my question and his answer. I thought of home, remembering the cicadas fluttering their wings in the scrub pines and oaks that ringed the pond behind my mother’s house outside Richmond. It would be morning there. The space between home, whatever that might mean for any of us, and the scratched-out fighting positions we occupied, collapsed. Soon, I looked out over the water. I smiled. I remembered late Novembers. Needles browned by the warm Virginia air collecting like discarded blankets on the shore. Taking the warped steps down from the back of the house on the cusp of morning, the sun slouching behind the tallest trees on the hills above the draw where our house sat. The light strong and yellow and thin, appearing to raise itself out of the earth, invisible, up from some higher plane where as a child I imagined there must be fields of cut grass and thistle that glowed until the day had again assured them of its presence, and my mother reading on the porch so early in the morning, seeming not to notice me as I walked past, my feet making a pleasant noise as they slid through the orange and yellow leaves. It would be too dark for my mother to see me. Out all night after I enlisted. I recalled telling her just like that. Trying to sneak into the backyard through the gate in the post fence my brother built, how she called out softly, not waiting for her breath to catch up to her voice, and it took me a minute to hear her, as the bullfrogs bellowed through their last darkening songs. A little wind came up and scattered those birds that always seemed to gather in the far cove beneath the willows and dogwoods that claimed that corner of the bank’s good brown earth. When they flew, they broke the water with the tips of their spanned wings, and the light from the house and a few stars like handfuls of salt thrown out appeared to break as well, and the ripples on the pond wavered as though the lines across the water were plucked strings. But I wasn’t there. All that had happened a long time before. I’d walked up in the dark under the awning of a few trees and she’d said, knowing somehow the way mothers always seem to, “My God, John, what did you do?” And I’d said I joined up. She knew what that meant. It wasn’t much longer before I’d left. I couldn’t remember having a life at all between that day and where I sat beneath a wall that ringed a field in Al Tafar, unable to reassure my friend, who would soon be dead. He was right. It hadn’t mattered.
    Murph paused. “Everything’s just so goddamn funny.” He had the letter folded in his lap, and he bent his head backward, and the outline of his face was oriented toward the sky. He made a childish connection, but a beautiful one, and his face, looking through the thin fingers of the hawthorn that rose out of the dust, seemed to connect the long black veil of sky above us, a few stars in its stitching, to whatever sky his girl sat beneath. And yes, it was full of naïveté and boyishness, but that is all right, because we were boys then. It makes me love him a little, even now, to remember him sitting beneath the hawthorn tree, sad that his girl had left him, but without anger or resentment, despite being only a few hours removed from all the killing of the night before. He sat there in the dark. We spoke like children. We looked at each other as if into a dim mirror. I remember

Similar Books

The Twin

Gerbrand Bakker

A Latent Dark

Martin Kee

Fingersmith

Sarah Waters

Tell Me Your Dreams

Sidney Sheldon

Lehrter Station

David Downing

King of the Godfathers

Anthony Destefano