Cowbird
By Hannah White Hannah
Foraging
My Texas grandmother calls them cowbirds. In her SUV with hot, black leather seats, driving away from the Houston airport to her home in the country, wide highways turn to narrow roads surrounded by pastures. Too green this year, she tells my little sister and I in her buttery accent as we round the corner toward her home in the Pineywoods of East Texas, passing by thick pines and weeping trees that hang over the farm houses like Christmas garland. We need some sun to dry things up, she says. The sky above us is huge, like everything else is there, and encompassing like a dark open mouth. Her hair is blonde and straight and perfect in a way I want to be at 13 years old. Her hands on the wheel are large and strong, like my father’s, and manicured in a deep mauve. We pass a field full of cows, horses. And these little white birds that hover around the cows and perch atop them.
They fascinate me, these strange looking birds with legs and beaks like sharp needles. She tells me they’re called cattle egret, that they’re all over East Texas. They can’t survive in colder weather. They forage through tall grasses for insects to eat, following large animals like cows who stir up bugs as they graze, even eating ticks and flies directly off them. The cows don’t mind, she says.
I was proud of the simplicity and stillness of this place. People there spoke slowly and softly, listened intently. I would spend days jumping over creeks and looking for green lizards with my sister in my grandmother’s backyard where my father grew up. My big, soft-spoken grandfather showed me old arrowheads and tools he found in lake beds and told me how the Native Americans used them. At night we would sit on their back porch sipping cans of sweet lemonade and listen to the crickets chirp. I love my family and this place where my father came from. There wasn’t a lot else to do there. And it was often so hot that we’d be forced to sit inside most of the day, the AC blasting so cold even my northern skin became prickled with bumps.
But what I loved most about Texas was that when my father was able to come with us, we were a family again, my sister, him, and I. Up north he always said he missed his home in Texas. Here, we slept under the same roof. There was no snow and my mother was not there but I could curl under a blanket in my grandmother’s cool, dark living room, shades drawn to keep the heat out, and I could close my eyes and not think about the space between this place and my home thousands of miles north.
Even when he could not come with us, if he was in rehab detoxing from alcohol or working, I could walk down the tiny hallway, walls covered in shiny wood, full of framed photos of us and my mother when we were kids. Of him in high school, his skin and eyes so clear, not blotchy and reddened from drinking. Him as a child. I wish I could have known him then. My grandmother tells me that boy could never sit still! In one photo he’s probably 6, in the grass beside the creek in my grandmother’s backyard. He looks over his shoulder at the camera, his arched eyebrows the same, though he’s changed so much. I could walk down the hallway and be engulfed in memory, comforted by evidence that he was healthy once, that he had a home.
Building Igloos
When I was a child, I thought my Texas father liked the cold. Outside our tiny cape in Massachusetts we built igloos, while inside my mother made hot chocolate on the stove top. The memories I have from when they were still together are all like this. Together, but never close to each other. I remember running my small fingers under warm water when I came inside, feeling coming back slowly, thawing the numbness that he was not able to fully shake. I remember the next winter when he was gone for basic combat training and I cried to my mother because I did not know how to make an igloo myself. I remember my mother’s brother taking me to the father daughter dance in elementary school that year and how everyone said I looked just like my father. This was the start of me missing him.
Hunting for Turkeys
As I grew older, I learned quickly that winters were hard on him. I didn’t know what Seasonal Affective Disorder or depression or alcoholism was when I was a girl, but I knew what sickness looked like on him. I knew that when he came back from Iraq when I was in middle school, when I’d stay at his house with my stepmother at the time on the weekends--she was a soldier like him--, I saw that the holidays didn’t make him as happy as they used to. I saw the glass filled with clear liquor and ice in his hand more and more after she left and the house was empty and he would fall asleep on the couch in front of the TV while it snowed outside.
My father used to go bow hunting for turkeys at the start of winter in Massachusetts. He never caught any. I’m not sure he was really trying, just looking to find something that reminded him of home. Searching for that stillness that comes when you’re surrounded by snowfall, the closest thing to southern silence. That stillness before violence that he remembered from when he went hunting with his father as a boy. He was always looking for something, but I don’t think he even knew what. Once when we were kids he took my sister and I to target practice at an archery range. The bow string snapped my sister’s arm, bruised, she cried all the way home.
Pancakes
A month after my 23rd birthday, in Massachusetts on a sunny Thursday morning in early May, my father accidentally overdosed on fentanyl and alcohol. He had been clean from drugs 7 years. 7 like the day when God rested after creating the world. My grandmother says he was tired, that God called him home.
We were supposed to have breakfast together that morning. About 6 months before this, he moved back to Texas to be with his family and try to recover after many failed rehab stays. My whole life, he had always said he wanted to move back there, but I didn’t think he’d ever do it until he called me one night when I was 22 from somewhere in the Carolinas and told me in a shaking voice that he’s so sorry but he couldn’t say goodbye. I wasn’t mad. I thought going home might be good for him. I thought it might fix him, I hoped it would because nothing else had.
My sister and I drove to the diner we always met at, but 9am came and went. I am usually quite good at waiting, but his phone went to voicemail again and I left an angry one. I would hear my own words to him echoed back a week later when the detective gave me his cell phone and I listened to the last voicemail he received. My mother tells me it’s okay; he never heard them.
We went inside. I ate pancakes and eggs as my father laid still on a table in a funeral home a few towns over, growing cold and stiff. I thought he overslept.
There were so many other times when I had started preparing for his death. When he didn’t call for weeks. When he did and his voice was sick with an illness that I could hear in his hello. One I would see in his shaking hands, covered in bumpy psoriasis that would flare up when he was drinking. I had tried to make myself ready for this before, since shortly after he came back from Iraq when I was 10 and I started to see how it changed him. But I thought this ending would come more slowly. I imagined cirrhosis of the liver, a slow fading away from me. I thought I would have been able to say goodbye. In nursing school, my sister learns that most male alcoholics’ lifespan is between 47 and 53 years old. My father was 45 when he died. I was only 23—I am still only 23.
But I always hoped that he would be an exception. I thought of all the old men that came in the gas station where I worked with beer bellies and wet brain; I thought I could maybe have an old sick father like this. But my father had no beer belly because he drank hard liquor.
But we had seen him on Monday, three days before, and he ate all of his food and talked and smiled and laughed and I don’t think I even looked to see if his hands shook. He talked about moving back to Massachusetts. He said he missed us too much. He said home wasn’t what it used to be. I swear I thought he was sleeping.
Waiting
I am used to waiting. I waited for you to come home from Iraq. 13 months I counted down. We Skyped and you were in a dark tent in a khaki t-shirt. You sent us little wooden jewelry boxes made by locals, mine with a sun and moon and stars engraved in gold. I remember waiting patiently as you brushed my hair in the morning in front of the tv and braided it down my back before you dropped me off at my mom’s before school. I remember waiting together for our food when you took me out to dinner on the weekends and we laughed about things that weren’t serious, you were rarely serious. When I grew older I waited for you to answer the phone. Waited for you to get your day pass from rehab so we could pick you up and eat somewhere that wasn’t a waiting room next to automatic doors. Dad, I waited for you. How am I supposed to stop?
By the Lake
The morning after he dies is sunny and beautiful, but I am sick to my stomach and sleepless. I walk down to the lake behind my mother’s house with her and my sister and we sit on the ground near the edge of the water and say nothing. I look out at the rising sun over the glassy top of the water while birds chirp around us like they always do. Everything is so green, illuminated in warmth. I look as a great heron leaps from a tree not far from us and flies out toward the bend in the lake. I wonder if these herons migrate. I can’t picture them outside of this lush scenery, flying across an iced-over lake, past the banks and trees covered in snow come winter. We watch, its long legs pointed back toward us, until it turns the bend and is gone in a moment.
Hail Storm
When my mother and father visited his family in Texas when I was just an infant--I do not have any memories of them together there--my grandmother says my mom was astonished by the golf ball sized hail that came down hard on their tin roof, bounced toward them as they watched from the back porch rocking chairs. I imagine my father, young and with a bit of a southern tan, laughing at my mother as the sky pelts them with balls of ice. Ice that would melt on the hot ground shortly after it landed, never sticking like the snow in Massachusetts.
My grandmother was not angry at my mom for leaving. She loved her. At my father’s funeral she tells her so. It feels wrong having her in Texas. The American flag is draped over his casket and she smooths out a wrinkle. Makes it look neat. He was always too messy for her. He drank a little too much even before he went to Iraq and she was young and thought she would find someone better some day.
Remains
You’ve been reduced to a large gray storage bin from Target. You didn’t make out a will and your death certificate says DIVORCED and I’m your daughter so the funeral home in Massachusetts needs my permission to move your body. Your mother wants you with her down in Texas and says you told her a while back that's what you wanted too, so I believe her and I give them permission to send what remains of you there. Permission like I am your mother. And I sit and I cry because I cannot even have a grave with me here until I choke and can’t breath. My grandmother buys your plane ticket.
I do not let them get rid of your brand new truck you got the month before you died. I use the little I have in savings to pay some of it off. I love my Jeep but sell it because I can’t let anyone take anymore of you from me. It’s white with Texas plates and it smells just like you, sweet tobacco and clean like men’s soap.
Inside:
A melted iced coffee only sipped from
Subway napkins in the glove box
Bumper stickers for the truck still in the plastic
The blue paisley pearl snap shirt you wore the last night I saw you, ironed on a hanger
An old hospital blanket covered in your dog’s hair
Your overnight bag from the night you died with a vomit soaked towel in it, your clothes folded neatly around it
Your wallet without the three pills in it the detective told us he disposed of
Beginnings
My parents met when my father came to Massachusetts on a temporary job with his brother. He’d stop in my grandfather’s convenience store to buy liquor when my mother was working. I imagine him towering over her 5 foot 1 frame behind the counter. I imagine her overlooking what he’d buy and falling in love with his smile and accent and southern manners. She had me when she was only 19, they got married, and my father stayed.
Overnight Bag
When I think of you it is too much, but I am so afraid of forgetting. Or of remembering wrong. I am searching for the truth of you everywhere. Writing it down. In your notebook I find a single poem in your handwriting. My mother tells me you loved to read. I didn’t know.
Your overnight bag sits on the floor at the end of my bed, still packed. Proof that you were going somewhere; I cannot put it away. You had to have been going somewhere. You must be somewhere, Dad.
Hotel Christmas
Do you remember when we spent Christmas in a hotel in my hometown because your apartment was a mess and you wouldn’t let us in it? We opened presents on the queen bed and then left you alone there when we went back home to our mother.
Do you remember when you fell in the rushing stream on Easter when I was a child? You said you felt the herring slapping against your body as they tried to run up stream. To new beginnings. To spawn. Easter and rebirth.
Do you remember calling me and telling me that you were so sorry but you had to go home? About 6 months before you died you packed the little you had into your car, you didn’t even have the truck yet, and you left for home, for Texas. You needed to go before winter came, I know.
But it followed you home. Record lows that winter. No power for days. No water, food shortages. On the phone just months before you die: I tell you Dad, I’m grown. You’re crying because you’re in pain, and crying worse because you’re crying to me, your daughter, on the phone. Crying because Texas could not fix you. I don’t let you know how much this scares me. I do not want you to feel guilt, not when you are so far away and unsober. I want to blame Iraq, the war. I want to blame Texas conservatism for not giving you the help you need, for wanting you to be a man that suffers in silence. I want to blame my mother for leaving you. But I mostly blame myself. They don’t understand, you say. They don’t understand.
Instead I ask if you remember when I couldn’t sleep at night when I was a child. When you bought me that toy horse at the mall after I finally slept a whole night without getting up. You tell me of course you couldn’t sleep; you are my daughter.
In Between
I used to meet my father in halls with chairs where people pass by, janitors and nurses and other visitors, rehab patients. I remember my father with me in airports. On the way to Texas. Holding my hand, me afraid of flying.
I remember my father at his wake, casket wide like a dark open mouth because his family wanted to see him one last time. I did not. I watch as people pass by. My grandmother hugs me like I’m a child and says to me with tears in her eyes that doesn’t look like your daddy, huh honey? It does not. I am sick and terrified but the pill the doctor gave me dulls it.
I want to tell her that cowbirds aren’t even from Texas. That they just ended up there in search of food. In search of something better. But they look so much like the great herons that glide over the ponds near my home in Massachusetts, their long legs always pointing back to where they came from.
Hannah White Hannah is a writer and academic editor in Massachusetts. She received her MA in English from Bridgewater State University. Her work appears in Fourth Genre, Brevity, Assay, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. She was a 2022 Pushcart nominee.