Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [5]
The branches were ringing with bird calls now. And I could hear kids laughing. A whole chorus of them screamed at once. Toward the far end of the orchard I could make out children’s silhouettes jumping and dancing under the trees. It was dark in there for mid-day but I definitely saw kids: little girls in billowy dresses and boys in white shirts. I couldn’t make out their game. The tallest boy had a stick and they were chasing something and flailing at it. I walked down the row toward them, towing my bigger suitcase like an anchor. I was traveling light in theory, but I’d dragged with me into Grace a substantial reference library. It had taken me a lot of nervous weeks to narrow down what books to bring. At the very last minute I’d thrown out Gray’s Anatomy because Doc Homer would have it.
I stepped over the irrigation trenches, mindful of my Italian leather uppers. I’m picky about shoes, and there was no replacing these now. I smiled, thinking of the awful silver loafers in the Hollywood Shop. I envisioned my predecessor at the high school dressed like that, standing in front of a classroom of fifteen-year-olds, twisting her white chiffon scarf as she explained cell division. What would these kids make of me? My shoes were pointed and my, as the magazines say, personal style leaned toward apologetic punk. I’d never had a teacher who looked like me; probably there was a reason.
I stopped to massage my aching shoulder. There was something up there at the edge of the orchard all right, a bunch of kids, and something in the trees over their heads. I thought about skirting around the little gang to avoid spoiling their fun, or maybe, actually, because I was afraid. I tried to move quietly. Whatever it was they were chasing, they were going to get it.
I could see plainly then that it was a heavy-bodied peacock shuffling from side to side on a low branch. Apparently the creature was too dull-witted or terrorized to escape, or possibly already injured. The children pursued it ferociously, jumping up and pulling at its long tail feathers, ready to tear it to pieces. The boy with the stick hit hard against the belly and they all shrieked. He hit it again. I couldn’t see the stick but I heard the sickening whack when it made contact.
I looked away. I’d arrived in Grace, arrived at that moment in my life, without knowing how to make the kind of choice that was called for here. I’m not the moral guardian in my family. Nobody, not my father, no one had jumped in to help when I was a child getting whacked by life, and on the meanest level of instinct I felt I had no favors to return. Especially to a bird. It was Hallie’s end of my conscience that kept pinching me as I walked. I dropped my bags and walked a little faster, trying to think of some commanding thing to say. If they didn’t stop soon the thing would be maimed or dead.
“Stop it!” I yelled. My heart was thumping. “You’re killing that bird!”
The boy froze like a rabbit in headlights. The other kids, down on their knees, stared too. I’d arrested them in the act of grabbing fistfuls of bright paper and candy that sparkled on the ground. The mute peacock swung over their heads on a wire. Its fractured body hung in clay shards the size of plate, held together by a crepe-paper skin.
When I was ten I’d demolished a piñata exactly like this one, with blue paper wings and a long glossy tail of real feathers. At a birthday party. At some time or other every child in Grace had done the same.
After an impossible few seconds they went back to scrambling for their prize. Two older girls helped the smallest kids scoop candy into piles in their laps. A cluster of boys elbowed and slapped each other behind the girls’ backs.
I felt disoriented and disgraced, a trespasser on family rites. I walked away from the little group of kids back toward the place in the center of the orchard where I must have left my suitcases. I wondered in what