The Black Cage

a young woman finds that when an escaped bird returns that maybe she can accept an absent father in tandom

The Black Cage

       The large old house sat on a hill above the New Mexico town. Surrounded by cactus, Joshua trees, and rock formations, the adobe walls seemed like a biological result of the white sand and afternoon fiery haze that distorted the hilly horizon.  There were several plants hiding behind the screened pavilion of the back porch, sheltered from the desert heat by blinds that could be opened or closed to block the bright sunlight on the north side of the house. There was also a birdcage near the back door about four feet tall and made of thin strands of wrought iron that had been painted black many years before when the foundation of the old home was laid. Nellie doted over the plants, watering them and painstakingly monitoring their growth. She’d become sole owner of the place after her mother passed away of breast cancer. Nellie’s mother Leah had been a youthful forty eight years old and Nellie herself was thirty one.

        There was one section of the back porch where the window screen could be opened up so that the hummingbirds could fly in and visit some feeders containing the bright red nectar that attracted them. The tiny creatures seemed to arrive in flocks in the early mornings and sometimes just after dusk. Nellie adored them with their long black, needle-like beaks and their gracefully sleek, dainty little bodies that appeared to thrust in passion while visiting the feeders that hung in the midst of the ferns and vines. There were more regular bird feeders placed around a large cactus outside in the back yard that held wild birdseed. All through the day every manner of blackbird, turtle dove, sparrow, finch, and cardinal would swoop and perch all around the back yard, bickering in the way that birds do, chirping and singing. They took full grasp onto Nellie’s heart as they consumed the birdseed almost as fast as she could replenish it. Her love for the hummingbirds and sparrows and finches, all the birds had been a gift from her mother. Leah had introduced Nellie the joy of life just as easily as she’d shown Nellie to the natural beauty of the mountains, the Mojave Desert, the California beaches, and the wonder of the stars in the night sky.

      Nellie had never married and she was childless. Her mother had given birth to Nellie in her junior year of high school. Nellie’s natural father had been a musician, a pothead in the late nineteen seventies, and was never even told of Nellie’s existence by design. When she was a little girl Nellie was told that her daddy had died in the Viet Nam war. After she got a little older and figured out the math, Nellie pressed Leah for the truth, spending the rest of her life listening to her mother’s anger at some guy whom was only referred to as ‘Fink.’ Every time Leah would speak of him hatred dripped from her lips in long, sticky drops that stained the ground at Nellie’s feet. There was one time, Nellie’s sixteenth birthday, that she demanded to know about her real father, insisted to be let in on the big secret. But all her mother could do was to walk out of the front door of the house in tears and drive away, not returning until the next day. After that night Nellie didn’t ask about him any more. She guessed that if Leah would ever want to tell her she would, and that in the mean time she could just imagine anything she wanted to about who her father was; that he was a sailor or a poet or a wretch that died cold and all alone in some dark and dank cave. There was no doubt in Nellie’s mind that her mother imagined some very ugly things of her own about him.

      On the day that she died, Leah let her hair down for the last time, broke out some pictures of her youth, and shared many memories with her daughter, along with some red wine. There were images of Leah’s mother, her teenaged brother and sister, and there were pictures of various cousins and family.  As the afternoon passed and the wine flowed, Leah actually lit up some marijuana, a substance that she had always been adamant about completely avoiding. As she became inebriated and the weakness in her heart increased, she finally opened up and talked about him.

      “You should’ve seen him.” she began. “Biggest blue eyes I ever saw, and when he smiled my heart melted like butter. He would sing with the radio like he was the one in front of the microphone instead of behind the steering wheel.  And when he touched me I couldn’t help myself.”

      “Mother’d warned me about teenaged boys, especially those who were on pot and played the guitar, but I didn’t care because I was in love.” Leah’s eyes were barely open as she remembered him, finally allowing herself to really remember what he was like. “I was young, naïve, and my body was full of hormones and my closet was full of new clothes. Bobby was so cool, which was very important back then, and when he made love to me he was so big, so good; just delicious.” Her eyes opened and she smiled lovingly, looking up as if Bobby was sitting in front of her once again, playing his guitar. Then her eyes filled with salty tears that flowed down her cheeks.

      “When I turned up pregnant my mother hit the ceiling. She called me a s**t, a w***e, and an imbecile; she called everybody an imbecile back then, or so it seems.” Smiling, she wiped a tear away. “Bobby was angry at me for some reason; maybe it was because I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks while I was deciding what to do about you, honey. I went to see him, to tell him about you and of course he was busy getting stoned and playing his guitar with his silly band. When I finally got him to give me a few minutes of his time he was very cold, cruel, which was very unlike him.”

      “He said that we should start seeing other people, that he wanted to see if he could find somebody ‘better’ than me.” Leah was crying, almost sobbing as she recalled the stoned young man that so severely and efficiently broke her heart. “I didn’t know what to say to him. How could I tell him I was pregnant and give him any choice at all in my baby’s life? I just ran out of that house and was never going to look back.” She calmed herself and sniffed. “Now that I am looking back I suppose that if I had given Bobby the benefit of the doubt things might’ve turned out differently.”

      “What do you mean, differently, mom?” Nellie asked.

      “Well, maybe he and I would’ve made an honest, Christian try of it and then things would’ve fallen apart afterwards. The way it actually turned out was things fell apart first, and afterwards I almost married this guy named Frank. But he actually wasn’t in love with me, he just felt sorry for me, and let me down even more than Bobby ever did in the end.”

      “And you never told Bobby about me?” Nellie asked.

      “No. I could never lower myself to ever speak to that son of a b***h again, especially after he said that he wanted somebody ‘better’ than I was.” The hatred returned to Leah’s eyes. She sat up and scowled at that ethereal image that had made her smile so lovingly before. The cancer in her body reared up and stole the moment, and Leah settled back once again in agony as her body began to finish dying. The loving gaze returned to her face and she reached out to Nellie.

“I love you, baby.” she whispered, grasping Nellie’s hand. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“I love you, mommy.”

Leah’s loving gaze blinked, her expression softened, and she sighed. Her face became an empty shell of the person who was alive seconds before, and in the backyard the birds at the feeders were disturbed from their perches as Nellie screamed out her pain.

Nellie often thought about that day as she watered the plants on the back porch and replenished the feeders in the back yard. She wondered what her  father, ‘Bobby, ’ would think of the hummingbirds swarming to the back porch in the pre-dawn desert air or whether he would still love her mother as much as Nellie did after so many years; had Leah given him the chance to. And her curiosity of her own feelings grew as she considered the decision her mother made for both her natural father and for the child that he would never know. As time passed Nellie spent more time by herself, and solitude, that familiar way of life she inherited from her mother as readily as she inherited the house, brought her to a numbing sort of madness as she would consider her real dad. The false promise of his despicability rose up in her mind as Nellie remembered the lie about his service in Viet Nam, and an idea of a personal test came to mind.

She went to a pet store in the small town below the house and purchased a white bird that would be kept in the black cage on the back porch. It would embody the integrity of what could’ve been a father’s love, would represent ‘Bobby,’ who’s memory brought her mother back to the forgotten love of her youth, and that final disclosure of Nellie’s origins that ushered Leah to her final reward. Nellie would care for the bird as eagerly as she would invite Bobby’s embrace if he were to ever come knocking on what was once her mother’s front door.

The bird was adorable. He had cute little brown eyes and a bright orange beak. His feathers were as white as eggshells and grains of dirt stood out from them in tiny little clods around his eyes. He sat in the cage on one of the sticks that Nellie set up as perches as well as the swing she purchased along with the bird. The bird spoke very little, and he watched Nellie carefully as if terrified by everything about her and of his new surroundings. The exception was in the early mornings when the hummingbirds would come to get their fill of the red nectar. ‘Booby,’ the name Nellie thought was appropriate, would chirp and squeak and flutter in his cage as if he were trying to help the hummingbirds find the portals where the fluid could be accessed. After the morning sun would come Nellie would go to the back porch to check on her plants and the white bird would resume his perch, watching her with fear in his eyes. And then one morning Nellie went to the back porch to find the black cage empty.

      Nellie reasoned that she hadn’t latched the door of the cage properly the day before after feeding the white bird, her little Booby. She was feeling rather lonely that day, having ingested more than her fill of the same brand of red wine her mother had drank and the green buds she’d smoked. There was no sign of the little bird beside the droppings on the bottom of the cage, not even a little white feather. His disappearance filled Nellie with almost as much sorrow as when her mother had died, leaving Nellie kneeling on the back porch floor in front of the cage, sobbing with her face in her hands. Once again she had no father in any way, shape, or form. And she was truly alone, an orphan in her afternoon of life in the huge house that she’d grown up in. For the first time that Nellie could ever remember she forgot to water the plants or to replenish the bird feeders. She stifled her tears until she could get back to her bedroom, shifting from wine to brandy, and bitterly wept until she finally fell asleep.

      The next morning Nellie went to the back porch and Booby was back. He was perched on top of the black cage and when she walked up to him he began to chirp. Booby squeaked and chirped and jumped around on the top of the black cage, as if to chew Nellie out for drinking too much and failing to water the plants or replenishing the bird feeders. The little bird seemed to answer her with a shrill “When?” after Nellie asked him where he’d been in a tiny little voice. To Nellie it was as if the little white bird was a like long lost friend that was doing his best to shower what little affection a pet bird could on the sad little woman that she’d become. Nellie raised her finger and Booby quickly flew to perch on her finger, as if she had raised him that way from the time he had hatched. In time he continually chirped at her, nagging about some unknown flaw in her character, and repeating in his high pitched voice that pet name she taught him, “Booby, Booby,”  melting her heart anew.

      The black cage became Booby’s home where he would perch on top of, scolding Nellie whenever she would go to the porch to water the plants or fill the bird feeders. The cage no longer housed him, imprisoning him from the desert, or the direct company of the hummingbirds and their flight. Booby’s freedom was an inherent liberty that Nellie had granted him upon his return to the black cage to chirp and b***h at her the way that she longed for her estranged dad to do. The test was a ubiquitous success in the way that Nellie had put the white bird in the black cage to personify a man that she was never allowed to meet. It was Booby the birdie that escaped, and it was his return that symbolized a reality that Nellie could hold onto in her dreams for the rest of her life; the premise that for as much as her mother hated her natural father, a man whom was never granted the courtesy of even knowing about Nellie, her hatred could be compared to how much Bobby, her real dad, would love her if he had opportunity to. The white bird’s return gave Nellie the strength to hold onto a long remembered dream of who her dad really was, had been, and could be, free from where her mom had imprisoned him in a synonymous black cage.

 

SR Urie

 

Reviews

[Ian Jordan]

Hullo mate,

Sorry to take so long to get back to you, for a guy who makes a living doing nothing, Ive been kind of busy lately.

I just finished reading "The Black Cage", and it was worth the wait. The story had some vivid images of the physical landscape, and the metaphor of the bird and cage for Nellie and life worked particularly well.

If I had any criticisms, I would choose another font, in my sleep deprived state, I sometimes had a little trouble keeping it all in line. I did spot one typo not picked up by spellcheck in there - "soul owner" near the end of the first paragraph.

Other than those very minor little quibbles, "The Black Cage" was an excellent and meaningful read, well done.

Regards,

Ian "skinner" Jordan

[Nathan Noble]

This was a wonderful story. Very descriptive and flowed gracefully. Booby cant pay child support but at least Nellie has a father now. Beautifully written story my friend. Great job.

[deeps]

Wow! THis is a well written story here
Everything just flowed so well.
A enjoyable read.