Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky

Author:Claire Oshetsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

ON A MONDAY, MARGARET BROUGHT HER FIRST BOOK HOME from Miss Rudnicki’s little lending library. The book was called The Tortoise and the Hare. Margaret had no idea why her teacher insisted she take a book home. She enjoyed looking at the shape of the word tortoise. Otherwise she found the book puerile. She threw it aside. Her lack of interest made her mother feel vindicated. When Margaret brought The Tortoise and the Hare back to school, Miss Rudnicki asked her if her mother had read the story to her. Margaret shook her head. Margaret hadn’t asked her mother to read to her. She had no interest in either the tortoise or the hare. It had begun to trouble Margaret that she was going to school and Agnes was not. The feeling made her less curious about what the teacher wanted from her. Every week on a Monday her teacher would hand her a book and she didn’t know why. Most of the books were about boys and their dogs. Big Red. Lassie. Rin Tin Tin. Old Yeller. After a while Margaret would mostly hide these books in a low cubby in the cloakroom and give them back to her teacher the following Monday in exchange for the next one.

After school, Margaret kept traveling through the untended woods and across the potato field to see Maarten De Smedt and his birds. She learned the names of the wing feathers and recited them endlessly: primaries, primary coverts, allulae, secondaries, secondary coverts, marginals, scapulae. Whenever Margaret asked him about the message she had sent to heaven, Maarten De Smedt would tell her not to worry.

“The answer will come any day now,” he said.

Margaret learned how to tell a champion pigeon from a weak pigeon, by the color of its eyes. She learned how to check for eggs. She learned how to bear the pain when a broody bird lashed out. When the babies hatched they were hideous featherless naked things with enormous eyes and black skin. Maarten De Smedt taught Margaret how to band the young ones with a metal band. It was necessary to hurt the babies, just a little, by pulling the fourth toe cruelly back toward the leg so the band would slip over the foot.

She learned to mix the feed: corn, pea, milo, hemp.

She learned how to whistle like Maarten De Smedt.

Then the snows came, the way snows do, and the path through the wood to see Maarten De Smedt was impassable for such a small girl, but every afternoon on her way home from school Margaret would see his pigeons circling. She knew them well enough to pick them out of the crowded flock by name. They tipped their primary feathers in her direction.

After a long time and many days of bitter cold, a first day came when the sun was out and the ground was like a soft wet sponge. Spots of bare ground were beginning to connect with each other, and what was left of the snow looked like tiny fast-melting glaciers in a muddy sea of yellow grass.

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