Alice Hoffman by Blackbird House

Author:Blackbird House [House, Blackbird]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-01-30T14:28:30+00:00

INDIA

MY MOTHER TOLD ME THAT THE BLACK

birds were singing on the day they found the house. You could hear them from the road. It was a wave of sound, black and blue and sweet. Like a bruise that was healing, nothing but peace and harmony. That was how my parents knew they had reached their destination. It was a November day at the very end of nineteen sixty-nine; the earth and sky were gray, and my parents were at the very tip of the world, or so it seemed.

My father had been born John Adams-Cooper, but he called himself Risha, which was Hindu for those whose birthdays fall under the sign of the bull. When we were teenagers, my brother and I used to say it was actually the sign for bullshit. All the same, my father had a dumb-animal acceptance of things, good or bad, and if that made him a bull, so be it. He had studied with a yogi in Cambridge, but was still suffering from exhaustion and post-traumatic stress. He had decided that cities were bad for humanity, so my parents had taken to the road and kept moving, from Vermont, to New Hampshire, to the far reaches of the Cape, where at last those blackbirds stopped them cold. It was an omen, my mother was certain of it. Twenty-four blackbirds in a row on the roof of the house, one for every hour of every day. One of the birds appeared to be white, and surely that must be a sign of good fortune to come. My father had just inherited some money from the aunt who’d raised him, an unexpected windfall. The house was destiny, my mother told me; the path that was meant to be.

Of course, anyone with the least bit of sense would have been instantly aware that this ramshackle farm was no one’s shining path. It had been on the market for five years, the family house of the doctor in town, sold when he moved his family to a larger place in the village. It appealed to none of the locals. People said it was haunted. Boys threw stones at the windows; girls vowed that if you had the nerve to walk past the big old pear tree, then turn around twice, the man you were destined to marry would appear on the road.

The place was a wreck, that much was certain, not that my parents noticed. The heater had been torn out. The roof was leaking. The plumbing ceased to function whenever the temperature went below freezing, so that the outhouse was still utilized, even though you could freeze your bum in a matter of minutes. All the same, no one could dissuade my mother, who had once been Naomi Shapiro of Great Neck, Long Island, but who had become someone else completely. She was a woman who saw what she wanted to see: Therefore, it was love that had drawn them to the house where my brother and I grew up.

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