A Good Friday: Sad Story Reverses Course
MICHAEL SEDANO
SweetiePie T. Cat, II, lies in readiness behind the Echinopsis mound. The pair of Mourning Doves busy themselves pecking seeds scattered six feet from the lurking grey bird-killer. The doves peck and wander, they peck ever-nearer the cat’s strike zone. A soft four-note coo of contentment changes instantly to a short alarmed churp! Fluttering wings leave a tiny cloud of dust in their wake, SweetiePie The Cat scratches at the vacant spot.
She’s a good cat, but SweetiePie is a cat. She kills. Lizards no longer abound in the backyard, not at ground level where the cat like some feline St. Michael subdues my serpent population. I miss those lizards, my little dragons.
Rats and mice I miss not at all. SweetiePie is a ratter par excellence. Sometimes I discover, by smell, a rat corpse behind a curtain. It’s less asco than an olfactory measure of SweetiePie’s value.
My earliest memory of the chuparosa starts with a whirling length of rubber garden hose striking a green and red hummingbird and both falling to the earthen driveway. I must have been three years old watching helplessly the older boy’s senseless violence. I remember Concha running to gather up the limp body. She pressed it to dry in the pages of the Bible she carried from harvest to harvest up the Central Valley. I hope it brought the luck Concha deserved after she disappeared in 1968.
I remember seeing the bird as a wonder in a world just opening to my perception. The bird’s color in bright morning sunlight held me rapt. But my brother and I were there. We could have stayed inside. And that piece of hose lay there. Who cut that hose that length, why? How does the lethal weapon appear at our feet at this instant, curled and hardened by sunlight? It flies straight and true. I see the blurring hard rubber hose close the distance between my brother’s hand and the floating green wonder.
A near-perfect exchange of velocity when the hose collides with the bird, both drop like rocks.
When SweetiePie T. Cat comes trotting proudly to Barbara’s lawnchair, something in the cat’s mouth catches my eye. My first thought is she’s gotten tangled with spiderwebs and leaf detritus and I’ll save her some irritation. Closer inspection, though, that’s not leaves. I think that could be a mouse, or a Sphinx moth. My heart sinks as I realize.
This cat can’t catch slow Mourning Doves with a pounce, from good cover. How in nature can this cat bring me this tiny, expiring life? Is she dead already, there's a bare spot on her chest, pink flesh no longer feathered. That's sadness right there.
Is she alive? A girl. A Black-chinned Hummingbird, the elusive bird whose red helmet glows in just the right light. This body’s barely the width of three fingers long, she’s warm. She lies still, no trembling, no faint heartbeat. Absent its tiny soul possessed of such vibrant energy when she swoops down out of the sky to whirl about the yard with a male, does she dream of shirrping and dashing in unabandoned freedom, a moment of whizzing up to the feeder, dip and sip, then flight?
Dream, or no dream, this is wrong. Colibrí never belong in the hand. Not here, not now. Here she lies because a cat’s gotta cat. Birds have to die. But not today, it’s Good Friday.
What happened?
Has SweetiePie T. Cat located a nest? Easy pickings for an opportunistic cat. One thing cats understand is deontic logic. Find a nest and the bird must return. Two birds. Hide and reach out, take the prize to Barbara.
Has the hummingbird tired of swooping out of the sky, whizzing like falcons in tightening gyres before flitting to the red plastic feeder instead of a flower? But now, the little Colibrí laughs at the foolish male, so sure of himself, lurking near the feeder, to pounce on her. Instead, la donna e mobile, she's found a pink wildflower, sticky and filled with the late afternoon's nectar.
The Colibrí hovers, sips, drinks deeply before she flits to another flower’s pink nectar, unaware the cat has insinuated itself near enough to dart. Unlike the doves, the surprised picaflor lifts off with lightning reflex but here, in the meadow thicket, the bird moves not fast enough to escape a single uña.
She's hooked and brought to ground. At first, she struggles feebly under licking tongue. The bird feels the cat’s breath as SweetiePie noses into the soft warm breast and licks off downy feathers exposing pink breast skin.
The triumphant cat brings her prize to her humans, to be near Barbara. That's when I spot what at first I thought, I’d hoped, to be a moth in the kitty’s claws. From now on, I shall check that cat's muzzle against another hummingbird.
Weeks ago, a hummingbird nest appeared on the patio cement. I looked around for shattered eggs, or evidence of devoured babies but found no evidence how the nest got here. I placed the nest into a vine, weaving a fantasy of discovery and a hummingbird family moving into the ready-made nest. I would observe and photograph the hatchlings’ feedings, the fledglings’ first flights, they’d be my friends and generations of hummingbirds would hang out with me until sundown.
My eyes provide the sole evidence of the bird’s existence. My hand owns a sensation of warmth without weight, looking into my hand I see a fluff of feathers.
The Black-chinned Hummingbird’s body limp in fright, the inert form slumps hopelessly in my hand, grey eyelids closed against life. I warily enclose my fingers around her until I feel a slight resistance from her downy softness. To squeeze more would crush bones.
I breathe slow, warm breaths across her. Repeatedly, wufff wuuff wuuufff, I fill my hand with a gently warm climate. If she dies in the next few minutes she won’t be cold. Wuuuffff.
Wishing her never to have found the cat's claws, never to have been pinned to the earth between talons, glad that, a moment before the teeth seize her for a lethal shake, I intervened against the cat’s nature and the bird’s destiny, I stroke the bird softly, cooing my own eulogy for the dying animal.
She opens an eye. Shining like obsidian, the black orb unleashes torrents of empathy in me. “So sorry, little bird,” I apologize as I place her into the abandoned nest. She stares back at me with no remonstrance, only resignation.
I fashion a hospice for her passage. After draping a dishtowel between my camera, a book, and Barbara’s drinking glass, I place the nesting bird into the solace of what darkness the texile allows. Her passage shouldn’t take long, poor little bird.
I shall allow the little bird to die on her own time, out of sight, inside the tent. Until I return, her body shall remain safe from the lurking cat. I adjust the covering and we make final eye contact.
A half hour later, I return to the hospice tent. The cat has remained at a distance, feeling my dudgeon but unchastised, verdad? I give myself an instant to prepare myself for the sight, I lift the dishtowel from my camera and book.
The nest sits empty.
It has been a good Friday.
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