NESSIE NANKIVELL - WE ARE NOT BIRDS

Nessie Nankivell has had her work published in Juked Literary Magazine, the Pace Society of Fellows, and has received commissions from ASCAP and the New York Musical Theatre Festival. She is an alumni of Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre Company's Youth Initiative and has had her playwriting showcased in venues throughout New York City. Nessie is a graduate of Pace University. @nessienankivell.

WE ARE NOT BIRDS
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​I couldn’t really be mad at him, that so. I hope you’ll come to understand that. I couldn’t perfect well look into those eyes, lashes like a fern plant, beautiful eyes, and tell him, “Don’t do it, sweetness. Don’t you dare.” He was a scared man, and I couldn’t then be mad at him. Still am not. And if I must remember now, I admit drinking the Pesticyde was my idea. Guess the blame falls on me, in a way. I sat at the kitchen table that evening, and I’m telling him, “No good can come from a hanging anyhow. I don’t figure I’m strong enough to get you down from the beam once you’ve done.” He holds my hand like it were a pup. Nodding, he knows it’s true, me not being strong enough. That’s when I tell him, “Sure though, we’ve got extra Pesticyde?” My husband sighs a yes with those big scared eyes.
We walked through the back door into the night. I’m holding him by the arm, and we see the whiteness of our crop out there in the moonlight. Grapes. Or, I should say, no grapes. The silver vines frown back at us, drying up all the moonlight. Not a thing had grown on our vines in the lifetime of ten of those moons. So, we stand there looking at them, breathing in the dryness. He put every last dime and then some into those vines, and they swallowed each dollar up like it was something sweet. The debt collected in his name owed to the Stig could never be paid off. I suppose through his sorrow neither of us figure a debt could be given like dowry from one name to the next. That night we only thought we were casting my husband’s problems to the sky. When stillness is no longer an option, action has to take its place. We did the best we could, gulls though we were. The farm was not in my name. I owned nothing until they said did.
I was a barley girl from birth, and my mother’s mouth had twisted something slight when I stomped into the kitchen saying I would marry a grape man. My husband had held me high above his head when we danced at our wedding. I’m the youngest mother in my village. By the time we wondered whether we should have a baby I was busy pushing little Tippy out from inside me. Tippy wasn’t mad at him either, sensible little thing.
Tippy was the one who found me the morning after I had gotten the Pesticyde out from the barn. I’m standing over his body, foam around his mouth, shaking my head, thinking I’m not mad, I’m not mad. It’s little Tippy who grabs her cold father’s head by the hair, her tiny fists clenched, and starts pulling his body along the dirt to God knows where. I put a hand on her shoulder and say to her, “Easy Tipps, leave your baba be.” I tell her that Masha will be by soon. I tell her I’m proud she isn’t scared of nothing dead.
I spend most of the day driving the plow, placing handfuls of dust by the legs of the vines. My husband, in his smart and worried way, had told me to save the ashes from his funeral pyre to spread over the soil of our field. Not for anything sentimental, nothing like that, my husband was not a man of unreliable ritual. The ashes would oxidize the field, give it breath. I thank him for that advice as I’m out there dusting the whole grape field with his sooty remainder. But that’s when I spy them: little white critters, little grubby things, seem to live on the stems now. Bigger than an aphid, big as far as little critters go. I remember someone from the Stig told me to keep an eye out for them, told what their name was, but standing out in the field I can’t for the life of me remember. I’ll have to go see them soon. The Stig will be wondering something about money, I know this now.
Tippy flys past the back of my leg, followed up by the blur of white that is Masha’s son, Max. I blow a little scolding into the back of their heads and Max swings around on his heels to jab me with his one-eyed stare. The silky, crusted flap of skin that stretches across his empty socket in a forever-wink bounces the sun into my face. His other eye rolls me up and down until I whimper out that he need be getting back to his mother. Out of the handful of children left in our village, Max is our only prophet. The whole village knows he has dreadful visions and they don’t like him around much. He’s odd and bright, and you can’t well be mad at him for being a prophet on the side. But in between me and myself, I don’t much believe in his profiteering. Just because the kid’s lost an eye in a chemical breach doesn’t mean he’s gone and gotten magic put into him. The truth is that we’re each of us a little mangled up from what they’re putting in the Resources. Everyone has some lump where it shouldn’t be. A person who’s body has been squished or mashed or defiled, at least out here, at least where we live, has got to proclaim themselves a force-defying-nature, or else they’re as bummed as the rest of us and look worse to boot. Or at least that’s how it seems.
We’re sat out on Masha’s porch. “Well,” she says, gazing into her big mug of hot water, “looking forward, you’ll have to track exactly what the white critters are doing to your crops. Exactly what the destruction is.” I have to nod, because Masha always knows just want to say and all. Her shoulders hang heavy from her neck, “What do you think you’ll do about your loans now that he isn’t—” and she stops at isn’t. Because isn’t that just like Masha? Always looking off into the future, and getting some sort of scared about what she sees. I told her I’m not worried about the loans, or the Stig, either way. I tell her once I get these critters gone, I’ll have enough grapes for me and little Tippy, and maybe some extra for Masha, too. Masha rocks on her haunches. The steam from her water makes little tears on her chin. Her bare feet roll on the ground like they’re trying to listen to the earth for an answer. I know that Masha’s been getting a certain kind of call from the Stig, you can see from the way her front door is busted in and splintered. Also from the way she walks in the mornings, hunched. Her hands collect like pine needles on the mug and she says, “Wee Max hasn’t had a vision since last market time.” She rocks a little more. “So maybe we’ll be fine, yet.” I know Masha, I say in my head as I stroke her hair, I know, it’s all right, hush. What I don’t say is, I knew my husband was wrong all along. I knew dead would only mean dead and not free.
I heard the screeching of a prophet boy from around the house, and knew little Tippy must have been teaching him about one thing or another. I left Masha in the dark and found the children by the side of the house. Tippy had a stone in her hand, and she tells me that they were smashing crickets between rocks, because her and Max liked the smell of the dead little crickets. Not her fault! Tippy’s telling me she had to find out if the boy’s fingers would smell the same when smashed. I give one hard shout and Tipps bolts for our house. Max stands wet with slobber and tears running the ridges of his ribs. The child clearly hadn’t eaten much more than an onion since he was a babe. They were born the same time, our babies. Masha and I practically pumped the wee ones out one on top of the other. Tippy is thin as reed while she’s tall as one, but Max, with his swollen belly and one milky eye, is only knee high to a firefly. Sometimes things won’t be fair.
“Have you any dreams this week, Max?” I ask him, because I don’t well know what else to say. His eye draws a line up from my feet to my face, slow as the sun, and he says after a sniff, “Those seeds you and mama bought. Bad seeds. I saw it.” “Well that makes you and me both,” I tell him. “The man you bought them from,” he’s telling me, “I seen that man, and he’s going to flood the mountain from the bottom up and the top down.” Good God, what child actor is this that can draw such a likeness to Death himself? I nod my head at the prophet boy, trying to keep it casual. I give a double thumbs up. And I kept nodding and walking backwards, away from Max and his crushed finger, back around the front of the house where Masha was still looking out into the dark. She’s telling me, “Love, they won’t forget about loans just because he gone.” I nodded at Masha, keeping it cool, very cool, walking backwards, and didn’t change my way of going until I had made it all the way through the field between our houses, until I had backed all the way through my front door.
That night I get into bed with Tippy—we’ve already used my and husband’s bed for firewood—and I pull her to me. There’s something about the smell of that child’s head that makes my eyes flutter and snap like a flag in the wind. I hold her close, and I breathe the sweat off her hair. Tippy flats her palms over my mouth, and holds them there so I can’t breathe. I can feel her cocky smile through the darkness. I let her hold her hands on my mouth because they smell so good. I am scared because we have no money and no grapes, and my husband is all over the field, giving breath to expensive seeds that are probably bust. I didn’t fall asleep that night so much as pass out because I think little Tippy went and suffocated me. I held her skinny bottom so strong in my arms, that I probably suffocated her too. We both dream about the mountains flooding from the bottom up and the top down.
 
The whole next week the air was bushy with smells of rain but we don’t get so much as morning dew. I take the fried leaves of our grape vines, and I hold them between my fingers. I spit on one thinking, drink up, but what difference will it make watering just one leaf? My husband, in that worried way, bought our special seeds a few years back. I tell him we aren’t in a folktale, but he tells me these seeds have been enhanced, they’ve been touched by the Engineers. He says if we want to keep up, we have to throw our parents’ seeds away. Soon the whole town’s got the new seeds, so I keep quiet with my thoughts. But, these seeds they must have needed as much water as a river because they never seemed to get enough to drink.
As I was standing there with the leaf, shiny with my spit, out of the dust stepped a copper. It’s the way a copper will walk sluggish as any living thing that gets me feeling nervous. They always walk up so slow, giving you plenty of time to think of all the things you’re guilty of. The copper touches our vines, and I growl at him all quiet so he can’t hear. But, growl I did. “Got some news from the State,” he’s telling me as I lean an elbow over my hoe. That so? I think. The copper looks around the field, back at the house, “You owe money, eh?” I nod. “The State has a deal for all the farms on the hill owing.” I nod again though I can hear Tippy shouting and Max crying, the two of them tumbling towards us from behind the house. “The State has recently sponsored an acquisition between Exralle and the rivers.” We’re squinting at each other mutually. “Which means Exralle owns the river, and all like-aquatic resources in the region. Should be great news for the market.” What does this have to with our market down the hill? “I’m here to inform you that should there be flooding, you have the right to that forest.” And then he tosses his dark head somewhere vague up the mountain, as if we both know which forest he’s talking about. “Forest Rights. From the State.” He looks pleased. I’m asking him, “Do I have rights to the water?” “No. It’s a Resource. Property of Exralle.” I chew my upper lip, how they love to correct you. “A river flowing to the ocean,” he pauses, rubs his stomach, “is such a waste of water.”
He makes now to leave. “Hey,” I call out to him because a fire got set in me quick like a little spark. “Why is the debt still owed on this land? Good luck asking my husband for money. I’ll show you where he rests but he won’t have much to say.” The copper fingers the leaves on my vines. He laughs some and says, “The land is yours. Isn’t that supposed to make you people happy?” His words were thick and like the stench of meat. I found myself grabbing his shoulder with my cold paws and begging him, “You lied to us.” And them from much to much a close distance I saw his eyes fix on little Tippy as she came tumbling through the vines, Max’s shirt between her teeth. Tippy giggles venom all over me and the fleshy man, but Max stops dead. “I seen you,” he blares out, “I seen you and you’re the end of us all!” I try to reach out for him, but his spider legs scurry under the vines, out of reach. He circles us and wails, “Water sold to an invisible hand! Dirty motherfucker!” That last word nearly knocked out my feet from below me. Where did he pick up something so exotic? Sure enough though, the copper had his earful and now he’s lunging after the child. I see the shining baton snap out of it’s sleeve on the belt. The black metal slaps against Max’s bare shoulder. The cloud of his single eye slams shut with a little puff. I see him paw his face, catching the blood on his cheek. If he was special before because of his one eye, he must be the jewel of the nation now with only one. Oh, god.
Without a thought or a prayer I’ve already thrown my body between the man and child. The stick comes down on my stomach, and stomach goes numb. I push Max’s wriggling body under a row of vines. The stick comes down again cold against my cheek. Blink and widen my eyes, trying to see past the dark. Blood on my lips feels like egg yolk. Then there was the stick one more time, gently, almost tenderly, on each cheek of my buttocks. The copper’s breath pushing through the risen ashes, which trails off into air. Both children were out of sight, so I welcome the ashes as they settle on my dress sort of like what you would call an embrace.
 
I figure I wasn’t speaking clear enough when I wished for water. Because what we got in the fields now has got more sewage in it than any water worth boiling. The dam at the end of the valley shot up like lightning after the copper came to the house. The water looked like it had wandered back up from some unholy drain. When the river was clogged up enough Tippy liked to lay between our vines with her face down in the stuff, looking dead as yesterday. But on the days the dam lets out I work those fields. Strange little grapes have started popping from the vines. They’re bright yellow like a furious star. The colour of bile, they are. The Stig comes to market with new soil because ours is bust and they promise us their new dirt doesn’t care about a little flooding. It’s crafted by the Engineers to marry the new seeds. I’m talking to Masha about it in the square. I ask, “Do you think I need be getting that new soil?” She sighs, she doesn’t know. “Masha, I’m all washed up,” I tell her. I know it’s no good because Masha hasn’t seen a dollar since her husband took their sheep and made off up the mountain without her two years past. Folks around us dart by with withered bags, wrinkled from when they were full enough to right burst. I rub Masha’s little back under the shade of a plastic tarp. A concrete-coloured lizard runs over our toes. I tell Masha of a mother, Nisa, who only needed go into a copper’s private office and ask for her husband’s debts to be forgotten, and it worked. Or so I heard. She said it only lasted a minute, only a matter of asking. I’ll ask.
But the heat under that candy-blue plastic must have been too much in the dark Masha must have just lost her wits for a minute. You can’t be rightly mad at her for talking nonsense. She shouts hot, “You better damn well buy that new soil. Borrow money on the land, save your grapes.” With one swipe, she throws my hands off her back. “You’re a plain fool,” she’s saying, “Kill your husband and now you ask forgiveness from those dogs? We all have to pay. We all do. No one is getting out for free.” I nod, I know, but here again someone’s taken Masha’s words from her. “But it’s not fair, Mashie. You know it isn’t, that so,” I say. Her spine there welded itself into frost. She looks at the ground and says, “I have twice the coppers prowling my windows at nights now, did you know? Ever since you screamed whatever nonsense at that pig, I have to put up with double.” Oh god, she doesn’t know, she didn’t see. I’m saying to her, “That copper was coming at me wild, I didn’t do nothing wrong. And once he came down on wee Max I forgot all about it anyhow.” Masha pulls her face away from the ground, her cheeks wet with moonlight. She cocks her head and says Max’s name and turns to face me and says it again. “They saw him? They saw my boy?” I can hear the blood in my ears. “Only a moment, he was running and dust was all over.”
Masha’s telling me that the Stig have been stealing the children of her people for a ransom sum that nobody can pay. Something about a list. Something about a scar. I can’t hear not even a word about it because now I’m crying and trying to rub all the mistakes out from under my skin. The market melts into a pile of stones around me. Left alone, I’m looking at ashes and lizards. Ringing around wild in my brain is the shadow of Masha’s creaking voice: “What have you done, girl?”
We’re told now that it’s Election Day. Masha isn’t no where to be found. We haven’t seen her or blinded little Max in near two days. Tippy’s been chewing on my hand all morning. I pull her along behind me on the mud road, and her face has brown patches that looked like mud too. But it’s not mud, it’s just my blood all dried up around her mouth because she won’t stop her gnawing on me. I don’t tell my daughter to stop.
We’re told we have been lucky. We have elections every season. That is so many elections, we’re told, so many times to be grateful for our State. This time everyone’s been called to the market square for a to-do about the Progressionists before the ballots are cast. Near each day the farmers come down to the square to try get someone to answer for the bust seeds, and I’m pushing around their solid bodies seeking for a person who can help me sort out my debt. I ask a woman selling paper cups of corn by the side of the crowd and she just sucks her teeth and tells me, “Today isn’t the day to ask for help, sure enough.” She spits a kernel from her mouth to my feet and turns to pick up one of the naked children squatting at her feet. I ask the corn woman about the crowd and she tells me there’s been an attack on our State, people have died, and the party is here to tell us the what-all. She asks if I want to buy some corn.
There’s a stage been set up at one side of the square. It waits for us. The awnings on the empty market stalls hang motionless, keeping to themselves. A Stig copper pushes a mother to the ground, telling her baby to cut its crying. People keep their gaze sidelong, or otherwise at the ground because they don’t right well know where to look. I can feel Tipp’s teeth on my hand and I don’t so much mind. Two hours die under our watch and then three black lorries pull in behind the stage. Our congress leader, enormous and shiny-faced, the head of Progressionists in our province, went making his way to the microphone.
“Many of you,” the congress leader’s voice blasted out of hidden speakers, “have never known a time of terror like these past two days.” Which terror? “Our nation felt the blows of hatred against her back, but the people, we have kept her standing tall.” What blows? Has Masha heard something? I look all over the square now, trying to find her face. “Still,” every hard sound out of his mouth slapped itself on my chest. The speakers must have been close by where Tippy and I were standing. “Still, your government was faced with the arduous charge of finding those responsible, and bringing them to the full task of the law.” Tippy glares up at several birds flying by overhead singing of their light freedom. Now’s not a good time, I tell them.
“The coordinated bombing, shooting, and destruction of two military outposts in the capital are nothing short of genocidal.” I pout my lip in understanding, hoping no one notices I’ve been a dumb ox and know nothing of what they’re talking. “At first there was not a shred of evidence. Yesterday we scoured the country. We breached every terrorist cell. We turned over every chair, every hair. Though it looked impossible—and for many it would have been—the Progressist Security Council has located the infidel.” Everyone around me takes a little gasp. Infidel. It’s a word you blush to hear because you know it’s bad, even though the word seems like it never really had a straight meaning so no one ever fully understands. “And we have him here today.” They take a gasp with fear now. “He is from your village.” A huge gasp, and one fainting girl, that so. “But he offers us a confession before his execution.” Everyone cheers, so I join in clapping and tell Tippy to get up off the ground.
The next part is a very hard thing to tell. I hope you will forgive me, and not be rightly mad if I can’t put down the proper words. I remember a something like a pile of coats lain on the ground behind the congress leader. The speakers filled my ears like bathwater as I noticed the little heap. I asked Tippy if she saw it too.
“The Progressist Party recognizes the collective conscience of the society will only be put at ease once the punishment of death is awarded to the offender.” An officer at the back of the stage comes tumbling forward and pulls up the pile of black cloth. My body shudders deep into the earth before I even make sense of how, or when, or what all—forgive me, I should simply say before I even made sense.
“A child,” I bawl out like a wild thing was ripping from my breast. Most everyone gave me glares to hush up, but I keep screaming because it’s Maxie. It’s little Max they have up there, with his moonish face all lost and a black cloth wrapping up both ghosted eyes. His feet sweep the stage as he’s carried by an officer from one side of the platform to the next. The prophet boy strung up for hungry eyes. “A child?” I demand sense from the officers, from my neighbors, “Why do they have a child?” But my fright must have sounded something wonderfully hellish because others start joining in, but they’re yelling with rage and relief. Men start pushing to the front. They wear faces that pretend to understand, as if they aren’t just creatures watching a kill. A man will always try to act as though his madness is more than just the beast inside him. Whereas a human mother doesn’t ever need reminding she’s an animal inside.
Tippy’s starts clawing her way up my side to get a sight of the stage. Her hands clutch my hair and up she hoists herself onto my shoulder. “Mama, they’ve got Maxie,” she says over the shouting, unsure of her question. I need to get to the stage, to get that child, to get Masha’s boy out of the hands of the officer and the congress leader, out of the black rope tied to his wrists and neck. I slide off to the side of the crowd to try to get round and hold Tippy sound above my head. This is only gives her a better view, but know also it’s better than her little self being stomped to the mud. We finally heave out of the side of the crowd, only to slip and fall at the feet of the most coppers I’ve ever well seen in my life. One snatches my arm and holds my backside against his groin. He tells me to stay put, to relax, makes his sweat to mix with mine. Tippy stands facing us, her arms twisting behind her back. I don’t want her to see but if I tell her to turn around she’ll find the Stig meaning to kill Max. As the copper grinds me down, I look in my daughter’s eyes and tell her, hush, Tipp, hush. “Whore,” his spit is in my ear, the stench of the word of law dripping on my cheek. They’re pushing Max, without much struggle no how, up to the microphone. Maybe I’m lucky because my arms got slick with mud, and I steal out of the copper’s grip. Below the missing eyes is his wee mouth is held against the microphone, “I ask mercy in God’s name,” but the anger of our village raises to the sky and I can’t hear another word. How grown up he had sounded. I almost felt proud, I know him, that’s our boy!
But what fool talk is this of three days past? Three days ago I’d seen him playing with my girl by the shade of the house. How did these military men fly down on this boy so quickly if the crime had been so unsolvable in the first place? I’m asking myself this and who all knows what else, and I’m screaming wild for Masha. Where was Masha to tell me this wasn’t all my fault? And, my God, I see them draw out a pistol. They’re moving so slowly that it all seems like a sick game. I feel Tippy screaming hot against my neck. I hold her tight enough to my body I could have drawn blood from the both of us. And then the sky cracked open. Then I turned to run.
I ran. I pray, please, try to find a way to not be mad with me. How could I plainly have done much else? What with the crowds, my child, the air giving in. If I got a hold of him, if I snatched his hollow little body from the Stig, then what? Getting away from the square seemed so easy, or maybe I’m just forgetting. I ran right up the valley road, splashing water in my face and in my eyes because the rain came down in long grunts. Masha’s house was breached by the river that had finally crept up from below. I stopped calling out for her. I stopped looking for Masha, and for that you must also forgive me. My daughter and me pulled through the field between her house and ours. The vines were now corpses floating on a wet desert of waste. Tippy swam up by the window by our door, peeped in and shook her head. Our home looked like it was in denial, the expression that all half-flooded houses have. Standing where our vines and ash used to be, not needing to say a word, we there decided that the house was dead. Together, Tippy and me looked up the mountains to the forest.
Four birds, swallows, followed us up through the flooded fields of corn and soy leading to the higher mountains. Swallows are a fair sign of spring. The good people of this war, the revolutionaries, made a speech in the market square some months ago and the words had never shaken from my mind. They said, “The people shall be the ones to bring spring.” It is a lovely thought, yes. But we are not swallows. We are not birds.
The ground dried as we rose. Took me half the walk for to realize I was the one following Tippy. She knew the way to the forest well. I figure she had made her way up here quite a bit more than she’d let me on to know. “We’ll go where the others made gone,” she smiles at me, hair licking across her face in the wind. The others, I’m wondering. My girl picked dried blood off cuts on my arms, gentle as a cow until we came atop a path cut into the forest’s mouth. Given all the what-how going on, it perhaps was not the time to be halted by just how darling Tippy looked springing through the forest. I wanted to swallow her whole. I wanted to put my child inside of me, like two bodies sharing the same bones, and keep each other warm forever.
She led us right to the camp of all the other forest livers. They sat among the vines and orange cedar, and looked down on our valley with soupy, tired eyes. I knew some but all knew Tippy. The women told me most men had money on their heads to the Stig, a good most of the people had been flooded out. All were farmers who couldn’t bear to till the earth that was so ruined by our government. I asked about Masha, but no one knew. When I fear for her and I think of her prophet boy a rage sweeps me skywards. A woman I came to know, her name was Talent, she told me, “Calm your anger. It will only make blunt the mind you still have left.” She had strong hands and helped my daughter and me on that first cold evening. I asked if she knew where Masha was, if she knew Max. Talent had heard through something she called channels that the Stig was looking for someone who could have set off those bombs and that it was just bad luck they had picked our boy. “They want all the farmers outside the faith to learn obedience. They’re getting ornery in the south, and the Stig wants them taught. Was your friend a believer of the other faith?” I nodded, yes. I had tried not to consider that deep and ancient difference between Masha’s family and my own. Talent turned the embers of the fire on their tender bellies. “They know how to turn us all against them. Then they make us prideful of what we have. Rather, what we are.” Unpleased with her words, she looked at her earthy hands and said, “rather, prideful of what we are not.” I asked her what to do seeing as I could testify that I knew Max wasn’t nowhere near no other side of the valley. Talent, her faced scattered like a fallen building, said it would be smartest if I just stayed put and quiet in the forest for a while. “For the sake of your girl.”
This is why I’ve written to you. I ask you to see reason. We are still here in the pines, looking down on our valley like it was some sort of wolf. The water rises and brings new waste with it. I camp with Talent, who is showing Tippy and myself which and what all to eat in the forest. My girl hauls back a dead animal each morning by the time I’ve woken up. I tell her I’m proud she isn’t scared of nothing dead. She never has been. But the night is a wicked kind of cold and brings only the faces of Max and Masha and my husband on its winds.
I am not a letter writer. This, admit I must, is my first. Engineers are people to be respected, I know that. I ask, when you made the new seeds for our fields and sold them to the Stig, you surely had no idea it would cause such an awful mess? My heart aches to know you did not. But the problem is bad now, that so. Perhaps you are the only ones who know how to help.
We wait in the forests above the little western village that’s been swallowed by the dam. I still look for Masha coming up the trail, and now I wait for you. The mountains remain all kinds of beautiful, and hopefully will stay in such a lovely way until you can be here looking at them for yourself. You created a whole new kind of seed, a new kind of life. I think that is what we need again now.
The situation is urgent. We cannot bring spring alone. We are not birds.