“I was gentle as I was able and that’s the last we’ll fucking speak of it.”
– Al Swerengen, Deadwood
I knew it would come to this
Sooner or later, it always does.
I saw my wife’s face through the glass. I was in the middle of writing an article, a different article. I came downstairs to get a fresh drink. Something with ice, something watery to replace what felt like a slow hot river of sweat trickling down my back for the last several months. A heat wave, a canicule in France, part of the larger drought withering crops and shriveling vines all over Europe.
She was out in the courtyard. Spend long enough with someone, and words start to become unnecessary. There was a worried look on her face, her eyebrows rising like a steeple toward the line of her hair in pity and horror.
I stepped outside.
Straight away, I knew there was only one way this was going to end.
Hawks don’t beg for death
Predators are prouder than that. But pigeons live all their lives in fear. From the moment we moved in to our house near the port, I became locked in struggle with the birds.
We moved in winter, when the pigeons seek any shelter they can find. The deep windows of our old house made for good refuges from the vicious wind, the tramontane, that scours the south of France on its way to the sea. One of my first jobs on taking possession of the house was blasting a frozen waterfall of dirty white pigeon shit off the back wall.
I screened the windows. They took shelter on the drainpipe under the eaves of the roof. I glued metal spikes onto the pipe, and they started sitting on top of the pinned-back wooden shutters. I spiked those too, and the birds gave up on my house, but continued nesting and cooing and fucking on the rooftops around us.
Our new garden furniture erupted in streaks of white like the dust of falling stars. Every morning, I would clap loudly outside to chase them off the wall that divides our courtyard the neighbors, to make them feel unwelcome and hope they’d move on elsewhere. But pigeons are stubborn. I knew we were headed for a falling out.
Any relationship implies a division of labor
And not all labor is physical. I pressure wash walls and screen windows and build IKEA furniture and take out the trash. She protects me from the dull hell of the grocery store and speaks French to lawyers and doctors while I sit mute as a stone in the chair beside her.
We all contain multitudes. Every woman has her animus, and every man his anima. The masculine side of her and the feminine side of me, that now as a couple joined legally and emotionally, we outsource sometimes to one another.
Her Facebook feed is filled with videos of kittens being rescued and baby deer being reunited with their mothers. Her heart swells with pity at anything with fur or feathers. I, on the other hand, sometimes find myself cheering for the lions. I admire the skill of the hunter, the furtive creep and sudden spring. The coiled lethality that lives in the heart of each of us.
She gets to outsource the monster to me. And I get to outsource pity to her. And we get to live more fully and wholly through each other, fulfilling our roles in this relationship we both hold up for as long as we are able.
The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days
– Robinson Jeffers, Hurt Hawks
The pigeon was doomed
It sat on the roof of our shed with one wing trailing on the ground, greasy feathers scratching on the asbestos roof as it scuttled warily from one inadequate hiding place to another. She was out in the yard when she heard it hit the roof, bouncing slightly before scrambling its way clumsily upright. Her first reaction was to turn to me.
In his magnificent poem Hurt Hawks, Robinson Jeffers writes about the wounded bird of prey he discovers on his property. No cat or coyote dared to finish it off. It took a poet to do that.
Pigeons are easier prey. And wounded ones don’t get healed. In a port city like this, there are flocks of them, unwanted and unloved. Their acidic droppings eat away the paint on our cars and contaminate the food in the warehouses down by the water. They spread disease.
Pigeons that can’t fly are defenseless. Easy prey for the sharp-winged seagulls that carve up the sky with their shrieks, or the cats that slink from rooftop to rooftop, well-fed but hungry for the cruelty of the wild.
Our cat watched from inside, pacing back and forth in ghoulish excitement at the window as I climbed onto the roof of the shed and grabbed the bird with gloved hands.
“You’re not going to want to see this,” I said to my wife.
“Okay,” she said with a grimace, quickly heading inside.
There was no blood. Frail vertebrae popped out of place between my fingers, the hangman’s compassion that severs nerves and brings death quickly. I dropped the pigeon into a box recycled from IKEA and watched its flanks rise with breath one last time and then slowly sink into silence. It fell with its one good wing draped over itshead, as though it couldn’t bear to see what was coming for it. The wild god of the world that dying men remember.
The summer breeze ruffled the soft feathers, mimicking the life that so easily departed. I could see myself reflected in the glass panel of our back door, gloved, dressed in black, standing ready at the doorway of annihilation. Pigeons don’t know that sometimes kindness looks like this. That sometimes the quick dispassionate kill is the best possible outcome.
But my wife does. She’s lost enough people she loved to have learned that.
Our natures doom us
Thanks to an all-protein diet, cats that live long enough are more or less condemned to kidney failure. Pigeons can’t help the mess they make, but it makes us their enemies. I’ve learned how to make a quick kill, and when. A vegetarian with bloody hands.
Sometimes you need the monstrous. The destructive energies we all hold inside ourselves, the shadow and the horror. But we also need a limit to our monstrousness. And a limit to our compassion, too. My wife could never bring herself to kill a bird, even when it’s the best thing to do. Sometimes, violence is the answer.
No one is coming to complete you. If you’re not a whole and complete person in yourself, no amount of love from an external source will get you there. But a long relationship like ours changes you. It has to. We all have flaws, our weaknesses, our blind spots. A little too much of one ingredient; not quite enough of the other. If we’re very lucky, what’s unique about us complements what’s unique in other people, my shadows bringing out her light and vice versa. That’s how love makes us better.
I pulled off the gloves
The pigeon’s body was already cooling in a nearby dumpster, the dropped feathers picked up and stuffed into the same bag to remove all traces of the killing. Inside, a fan whirred, the living room dark against the heat of the day, the TV on to drown out the sounds from outside.
“It’s done,” I said.
“Was it bad?”
“I was gentle as I was able.”
“Thanks.”
She doesn’t want me to tell her something pretty. She knows that would be a lie. Jeffers wrote of something rising from the ‘soft feminine feathers’ of his Hurt Hawk, something to make the herons cry out in fear. But pigeons die soft and easy. At least in my practiced hand.
And I find myself wanting to tell you something pretty. But also something true. Something that connects the tired pop of vertebrae and the noiseless flutter of feathers and the door closing behind me, returning to this world from a harder, sharper one.
She needs me to be the monster when a monster is called for. And I need her to be the light. The bright light in the darkness that hunters and hawks turn to at last, when the wild god of the world shows its teeth.
…
© Ryan Frawley 2022
All proceeds from this article will be donated to Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontiers.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Justin Ziadeh on Unsplash