The Silence on the Shore by Hugh Garner

Author:Hugh Garner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: 2011-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

One evening early in September, Grace heard Gordon Lightfoot’s voice from the yard and wondered what he was doing out there. When she looked through her window she saw him standing under one of the elm trees pointing into the northeast sky. Walter Fowler, wearing a sleeveless undershirt, was standing beside him.

“See them up there, Walter. Right behind that chimney,” said Gordon. “They’re feeding on the fly, so to speak. Migrating. You see small flocks of ’em every year at this time going south.”

Walter nodded.

Grace opened the screen door and walked out to the porch, wearing a pair of shorts and a halter. From where she stood she could see nothing in the twilit sky. “What is it, Lightfoot?” she asked.

“Nighthawks. Flying south. Catching bugs on the way.”

“I don’t see them,” she said. She looked down at Gordon who, despite the cloying heat, was wearing a carelessly tied necktie. She sensed he was drunk even before she noticed that his fly was unzippered.

“Come on down here, Gretchen. Naturally you can’t see ’em from up there.”

“I’ll come down when you do up your fly, not before,” she said.

Gordon looked down, laughed, and pulled the zipper closed. “Form of direct advertising,” he said.

When Grace reached the grass Gordon pointed with his arm over her shoulder. “See ’em up there. Up behind the storage plant’s electric sign. They’re nighthawks. If we were closer you’d hear ’em beepin’. Beep all the time, every early morning and evening during the middle of summer.”

“I see them now. They’re catching bugs, you say?”

“Sure. You never watched nighthawks before? That’s the trouble with half the people of this world: live all their lives and never see farther than their own stupid little selves. All summer I used to watch the hawks, from the front porch. There was a pair of ’em nested on the roof of the Parklawn Hotel”

“How do you know?”

He gave her a disgusted look. “Because I collected their rent.” Then he said, “They like to nest on the flat roofs of high buildings. Lay their eggs in the gravel. Warm, safe, and private like a government-inspected cat-house.”

“Cat-house?”

“Yeah.” He winked at Walter. “A house for cats, you know.”

“I never knew you watched birds,” Grace said.

“I watch everything that goes on around me — when I’m sober. I’m not really a bird-watcher though. I have a hard time telling a sparrow from an ostrich, but I try. The only time bird-watching, like anything else, becomes bad is when you become a fanatic about it, like the old dames who kick about them filling in swamps ’cause it puts the red-winged blackbirds out of their cosy little homes. Half the naturalists are frustrated lovers of —”

“Ha-ha! Like you?” asked Grace.

“I shouldn’t have used that expression,” Gordon said to Walter. “It’s one of the key words in Gretchen’s vocabulary.”

“What?” Walter asked.

“The word ‘lover,’” Gordon answered, glancing over her halter and shorts.

“You’re a frustrated lover,” Grace said. “Don’t you think so, Mr. Fowler?”

“He could be,” said Walter, smiling noncommittally.

“I know he is.

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