Page 19 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

feathers glowed. I hadn’t known that gray could be so luminous. I called my friend Deena

Metzger, who advised me to return the bird to the site of his death so that the female

might know what became of him. I took him back to the little patch of grass by the curb

and tucked him under a nearby bush.

A few weeks later, a fledgling jay lay dead on the flagstone by the guest room, a plump

young bird on my doorstep. A tiny gray feather was stuck to the sliding glass door. This

jay, too, was still warm. I left it there for a few hours then buried it near the place it had

died. The following spring, I found a dead jay at our cabin in the mountains, a whole bird,

cool and hollow, its desiccated body perfectly preserved by the dry mountain air. All that

was left was a shell of feathers.

Fistfuls of blue jay feathers appeared on hiking trails and at camping spots. When I

walked the dogs, blue jays flitted from branch to branch ahead of us. It occurred to me

that I was a host. My task was to tend to the guest that was this story and to the jays. I

began leaving peanuts in my patio. I learned to throw them onto the roof so that they

didn’t roll back down into the rain gutter. Most days, four jays came, two that would eat

from my hand. One intrepid bird in particular would peck at the little window in the front

door if the peanut dish was empty. If I left the slider open in back, he would hop into the

house in spite of our two dogs and two cats, calling with his hopeful, shrill reminder until I

came with peanuts in my outstretched hand. Have you ever felt a wild bird’s talons wrap

around your fingers, or his smooth pointed beak gently pecking at the soft flesh of your

palm? It is an honor, thrilling and primal, this meeting of talon and skin. He turns his

head sideways, as do I, and we gaze into each other’s eyes.

One day, my friend B calls from Liberia. He is an ex-combatant who had joined the

Liberian army when he was a teenager because the recruitment ads said that if he

joined he would get an education. He became a model soldier, and, eventually, a

presidential bodyguard to the infamous Sam Doe. He was sent for anti-terrorism training

in Israel, weapons training in Lebanon and interrogation training in Romania, all of it paid

for by the CIA. When Doe was overthrown by Charles Taylor, B was imprisoned and

tortured. Upon his release, he joined anti-government rebels. When the war ended in

2004, he became a traveling salesman for bloodshed, recruiting child soldiers to go fight

in neighboring Ivory Coast. Around the time we met him, he was overcome by remorse

6