XIII THE OWL

one night as he lay drifting in and out of sleep he thought he heard a series of blood curdling sounds piercing animal screams an unsettling clamor of sinister bird cries as if something were being flayed alive the next morning he woke up with the feeling that he had had a terrifying nightmare and then when he left the house early that morning to catch the schoolbus he realized he was running a little late so he took a slightly different route instead of going to catch the bus at the usual stop he decided to go to the next stop over and so he cut through a narrow little street that intersects the street he lives on it’s called Via Giovanni Pascoli one of the houses along the street has a main outer door made of wood the big outer door of a house that’s been there for two hundred years one of those typical old houses owned by farmers and he suddenly sees and realizes as he looks just what the horrible screams were that he half heard as he lay drifting in and out of sleep he sees right before him on the massive wooden door two large birds have been crucified they were nailed alive to the wooden door with sharpened tree branches piercing their wings to brace them open and driven through the flesh of their legs someone had impaled on the door a live owl and a live dove and had left them there to scream through the night

the boy stands there in shock at the sight of this horrible spectacle and immediately afterward when he boards the schoolbus everybody is in a fever one of the kids is waving a copy of the local newspaper there’s a blaring front page headline that says that Antonio Bardellino’s body was found on a beach in Brazil he was beaten to death with a hammer everyone is amazed and all the kids are saying that it can’t be true and that evening when he gets back home everyone is upset everyone is talking about it the news hit them like a bolt of lightning from a blue sky everyone was dazed and anxious at the death of the revered and feared chief the death of a man who had become a legend a man that the town was proud of when all was said and done proud of and grateful to and in every house in town everyone was talking about this and everyone knew how and why it happened and who was behind it there were differing versions which triggered excited shouted debates everyone had their own views to put in an opinion or a comment

but then the boy thought to ask his father what was the meaning of the strange sight he had seen that morning on the massive outer door of the old peasant house and his father explained to him that this was an old country tradition that had been a common custom until before the war and involved crucifying on the front door of a house a pair of birds an owl and a dove letting them die slowly screaming all night long a sort of pagan ritual that was designed to exorcise the devil from the house and the person who had crucified the birds was the farmer who lived in that house a farmer about the same age as the boy’s father but with a much more old fashioned view of life and the world the farmer had done it to ward off the devil to protect himself against a tragic event and that was why the night before there had been this horrible pandemonium this welter of discordant screams and cries all night long and by the way what an unsettling coincidence the very next morning on the front page this unbelievable news