She flopped back onto the sand one more time and stared up. Tree crowns, beautiful clouds, the gyre of birds downstream near the old diversion station; in the corner of her eye a fast first quiver of bats, probably her bats. The cliff across the river changed color as the light left, and she wondered if it had been daylight or dark when Asta had driven down the road across the river, with someone. In early December, it always seemed dark.

“Are you all right?” asked Ned.

“I’m fine. A little woozy,” she said. Woozy, muzzy. She should get T-shirts that labeled the condition of her day.

Down the beach, Merle called to Ned to play cards, and Helen skittered off with him. Maude was going on about her half-finished list. She hadn’t seen an interesting bird or Harry’s dig, and advice—she’d barely started with the advice. Why was Sam so slow at shuffling and dealing? Had no one trained him?

Another shadow across the sun, Jane passing with her binoculars up, an expert at work. Quite an act; Polly hadn’t seen such a thing for ten years. Hopefully Maude noticed.

“What’s so interesting?”

“Maude claims she saw a black vulture, so I thought I’d check.”

Polly turned to an astounding sight, no rooks but a murder of crows, a whirl of magpies. What was the word for ravens? An unkindness. “Do you know what a black vulture looks like?”

“No.”

“It’ll be a dead deer, and the dogs will follow you and roll in it,” said Polly.

“We’ll be using your bathtub to wash them,” said Jane.

“Jesus, Mom.”

“Jesus, Polly.” Jane was fiddling with the focus on the binoculars, and then she was gone. Polly could already imagine the stink of what the birds were eating, and then, with a shift in the wind, she realized she could already smell it.

She lurched upright. “Mom, stop!” Polly started to run, not easy on round river rocks and sucking mud, wondering if she was imagining the smell, wondering why she’d thought of a deer and not something far worse. “For fuck’s sake, stop!”

She could hear Helen’s happiest fuck fuck fuck singsong, Maude’s raucous laughter, Ned calling her name. Polly called back, telling him to hold on to the children. Jane heard nothing and marched, oblivious, toward the spiral of birds, and Polly ran drunk in a carousel of images, her childhood of bodies on beaches. She was within a yard of Jane, both of them zigzagging through willow saplings, when they came into a clearing and saw the white outstretched arms, a back mottled with tentative pecks, thick reddish-gold hair spread over the drying sand.

Jane screamed.

Part Two

Part
Two

10. Summer 1968

10

Summer 1968