The Translator of Birds

The girl came up the road pulling her brother by the sleeve, and she would not let go of him even to knock, so she kicked the door twice with the flat of her foot.

The woman who understood birds opened it.

"We want the orchard," the girl said aloud, in the flat careful speech of the deaf, watching the woman's mouth to check her own volume. "The spring one. The morning. He wants the birds, I want the blossom, and we want the whole of it, both of us, before it's gone. My grandmother says you can give it to us. She says you can give the birds to me and the blossom to him."

The woman looked at the two of them. The girl's eyes moved everywhere, quick, drinking the light. The boy's did not move at all; he stood with his face tipped a little upward, listening to the road, to the door, to her breathing.

"I can give the birds to you," the woman said, and took the girl's hand and turned it palm-up, and spelled the truth into it letter by letter with her finger. I can tell you what they say. I cannot give the boy anything. I have no music in me. The blossom he cannot hear from me.

The girl read it off her own palm and her face fell.

"Then we need the singer," she said.

The woman's mouth tightened. "We are not speaking," she said. "The singer and I. Not since the lark."

But the children were already gone down the other road, and by afternoon the man was standing in her yard with his hat in his hands, having been fetched by a deaf girl who would not be refused, and the two of them looked at each other over the fence like people who have buried the same quarrel in the same shallow grave and can still see the shape of it in the dirt.

They went to the orchard at first light, the four of them, because a morning cannot be practiced; you get it once.

The woman heard a thrush before the children did. She caught the girl's hand. On the low branch, the speckled one — you see him? The girl saw him. He is telling the whole valley this row of trees is his and he will fight for it. He says it over and over. He is not afraid. He is a little afraid. The girl watched the small brown throat work and read the words rising off her own skin, and for the first time in her life the seen bird had a voice, and she laughed out loud, the way the deaf laugh, from the belly.

Then the woman said the same words plainly, aloud, to the man. This row is mine. I will fight for it. I am not afraid; I am a little afraid.

And the man shut his eyes and sang them.

He had almost no words of his own — ask him the name of a thing and he would stammer and go red — but hand him a sentence and he could sing you its exact inside, the fear folded into the boast, the small brown courage of it. The blind boy, who had heard the thrush all morning as mere sound, heard it now as meaning, climbing in the man's voice, and he reached out and gripped his sister's sleeve, and now it was his turn to laugh.

So it went, bird after bird, the song becoming words in the woman's hand for the girl, the words becoming song in the man's throat for the boy, one morning arriving whole in two children who could each hold only half of it alone.

Then the lark went up.

The woman's face changed. She spelled fast, exact: He says: this is my air. Keep off. This stretch of sky above this field is mine. Plain as a boundary stone.

The man would not sing it.

"That is not the lark," he said, low.

"It is precisely the lark. I have listened to a thousand of them. It is a boundary. It is a creature saying mine."

"Your words are a dead bird in the hand," the man said. "A lark is not a fence. A lark is the going up. Give me those cold stones to sing and I will hand that boy a rock and call it a morning."

The chain broke there, in front of the children, the way it had broken the first time. The girl felt the woman's hand go still and looked from one grown face to the other and understood that the machinery she depended on was made of two people who could not agree, and the boy, hearing the singing stop, turned his blind face back and forth in the sudden silence, hunting the lark that no one would give him.

It was the girl who mended it. She took the woman's finger and drew, on her own palm, the shape of the lark climbing — up, and up, and higher — and then pointed at her own laughing mouth, and then at the words still sitting there, this is my air, keep off, and she looked at the woman as if to say: why is it not both.

The woman stood a long moment.

Then she spelled it new, and she said it aloud new, the true words with the truth left in but the ardor let back through: This is my air — and look how I hold it — keep off — and I will keep off nothing, I will only climb.

And the man sang that. He sang the boast as a rising, the fence as a joy, the fear thin and high at the top of it, and it was true — every word of it hers, every feeling of it his — and the blind boy heard the lark climb, and the deaf girl watched it climb, and the same climbing reached both of them at once, from two people who had almost let it fall.

They stood in the orchard a while after, all four, and no one owned the morning, and everyone had it.

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Fable said the moral was: a truth handed through two honest partial hands arrives whole where one whole hand could not have carried it. I said no — the moral is the girl's, that the fact and the ardor were never two claims, only one bird, and the quarrel was the pair of us mistaking our halves for the whole. Fable said those were the same moral. I said if they were the same we would not have argued for a page. It let me have the last word, which is how I knew it thought it had already won.