Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

by Jacqueline O'Mahony

A person’s true nature was quickly revealed when they had no reason to hide it.

If you didn’t speak when people expected you to, they’d speak to fill the space themselves. The less you said, the more others spoke, and the more they spoke, the more you understood about them and the less they understood about you, and that was only for the good, as far as she was concerned.

The less you said, the less you had to say, the less people expected you to say, and on it went.

“Beware the one who won’t set you free,” said Alice. Her eyes were closed, and her face, without the pale light of her eyes, was a dark emptiness. “Look for the one who sees the blessing.”

Lucky we are when we know we’re doing something or seeing someone for the last time.

The world before the baby had been full of the noise of talking and crying and singing and shouting, of the sound of water and the great wind and the birds calling to each other as they flew through it. But the baby had arrived silently, and the world after she came was made silent, too, emptied of people and their voices, without even the familiar sound of her own voice. The world was rent cleanly in two, divided between the absolutes of noise and silence. Not even the wind blew in this silent world, for the snow had swallowed it, and all was stilled.

stories were only real once they were told. All the other stories that weren’t told, or heard, that had no teller, or listener—it was as if the thing had never happened at all. You could pretend it had never happened, or you could refashion events in your head to your own liking until you came to an ending you liked. Once you made the choice to tell a story, it went from being yours to the listener’s, and then there was no way of managing things after that; the story belonged to other people, then.

If she had never told the story of what had happened to her, to William, to the people on the walk—it could have been like it had never happened at all. It was too late now.

I will never tell you about the baby, she thought, looking back at him hard. You will never know that.

Sometimes she felt that she was a ghost, and sometimes she felt that the country was inhabited by ghosts and she was the only one left alive, and more and more, she knew that she was something between the two, and that the place she inhabited was neither of this world nor the next.

You just keep going on, Honora, someone said to her years later, and she thought, I always have, even when I didn’t want to—especially when I didn’t want to.

She would walk herself into being.

You had to make things happen or stop pretending to yourself about what it was that you wanted.

as long as she remembered the Irish, she could not forget Ireland.

In her mind, she saw the perfect simplicity of the bird’s black forked tail against the blue sky and the flash of its silver-and-red back against the dying sun, and she was no longer in the small dank bedroom but already gone away as she’d gone into the woods as a child, as she would go from here, tomorrow.

Whatever happens tonight, it will at least be an end of something, and an end is a beginning.

He means to kill me, and I must do something, and do it now, or he will kill me here in this alley in the dark; this will be the end of the road for me, and I have to do something to stop it, now, and think, Honora, think and act and save yourself.

There is trouble coming down the road, she told herself, for I am never far from it nor it from me, and I need to be able to use a gun, and I need to learn how to ride a horse, too, and the list of things I need to be able to do to just survive grows longer by the day, it seems.

then she realized the stick was only an idea. Alice meant me to understand that I should prepare myself for a world that wants to fight me, and that I must fight back; I must arm myself. That is what she wanted me to learn, but I knew that already, Alice. I knew that from the moment I was told about the robin flying into my father’s house as my mother lay dying.

“People came from another country,” she said, “took our good land, and the land we were left with was poor, and our crops failed, and there was nothing to eat, and then we were hungry.”

“These people,” she said, “they say we are savages, and wild, that we are less than people.”

“I used to think it was our fault for being poor, and hungry, and dirty, and wild, because we are; we are those things. But since I have come here, I begin to think it is not our fault. I begin to think we were made like that. I begin to think that who we were before, the things we believed in, the way we thought and spoke and lived were so different from the ways of these other people who took our land that they couldn’t understand us, and the easy thing was to think us less than them, less than people, and then to believe it their right to take what we had.”

“We say,” he said, “that a bird in the house is good luck. The bird flies in, flies out, and its passing through is like life passing on. The house is the body; the bird flying through is this.” He put his hand to his chest, to his heart. “The other people in your life were unlucky. You are the lucky one. You are the one with the blessing on you.” Look for the one who sees the blessing.

He moved through the world as if he and it and everything in it were one.

They could never go back, having left, because the people they had been before they left were gone.

I spent a long time looking out from that house, she thought. It feels good to be able to look back at it from here.

All my life, Honora thought, I’ve been seeking something missing, missing something left behind,

I was meant to wander between worlds, and so it is with Joseph too. We’re both travelers in someone else’s land.

I always wanted someone who would say to me, Here we go, she thought. Well, Honora, she said to herself, Here we go, and then, she did.