Sheri Joseph

The Elixir

MONDAY morning, another one.  I’m finished with the feeding and am fetching a wheelbarrow to start mucking stalls, when I feel my boot roll something as soft and little as a mouse.  It tumbles a few feet along the brick-lined hall, spinning dust and cobwebs and horsehair and specks of wood shavings about itself as it goes.  When I pick it up, it’s grown into a grayish cocoon wrapped around a pulse of life.  I know it’s alive—the way you know a cocoon has life in it, despite the fact that I just kicked it half across the floor—but it’s so entangled it can’t move.  I hold it as gently as I can and worry the some of the grime away with my fingernails.  A black reed of a beak appears, like a grain of wild rice, then a glimmer of green feathers, a pumping iridescent breast the size of my thumb.  Another damned hummingbird.

They come in here after the fluorescent lights.  Maybe a thing with a brain the size of a needle’s eye can’t tell the difference between a gladiola and a tube full of electricity—I don’t know—but they’ll fly in here sometimes and just bounce off the lights like moths.  I saw one doing that for a good ten minutes, until I scooched it out the door with a broom; then it flew away.  If I don’t catch them in time, they’ll exhaust themselves and wind up on the floor, like this one.  Their metabolism’s so fast they just short out after a while.

Once I’ve uncovered her white throat, I know it’s a female.  Maybe she’s the same one I chased out yesterday.  “Stubborn,” I tell her.  “See where it got you.”  But you can’t reason with a bird as if she were your teenage daughter.   Then again, teenagers don’t necessarily listen any better than birds—they’re bound to go zinging off their own bright lights, deaf to common sense.

With Marcy, it was cities.  First Atlanta, then Jacksonville, then Memphis—three times home in the back of a police car.  Between those, and after, I never knew her destinations or what drew her one place or another.  Something about a city.  She’d show you with her glass-hard eyes and the set of her chin which way she was oriented, as if she were picking up a distant signal other people couldn’t hear.  As if the whole time you were trying to talk to her, she was listening to something else.

The truth was, I didn’t understand that girl.  I wanted reasons.  Sometimes I blamed her dad for not paying any attention to her.  “She’s not easy to love,” Jimmy would inform me like it was news, and I’d holler back, “She’s your daughter.  She’s thirteen.”  We would fall to silence, and later Marcy might pass through to get a Pop-Tart and go back to her room, without ever looking, as if she walked in another reality and Jimmy and I were just a background flutter, characters on her TV.

After Atlanta, she returned armored in the proof that she could take care of herself.  “It’s not about you,” she would say.  “It’s not about him, either.”  But I wanted a cause, and when she took off for Memphis I settled on Jimmy.  He came home one day hauling the trailer, another horse he’d got for a bargain, and I said,  “No, sir.  You are not putting another horse in my barn, not at a time like this.”  He said, fine, he’d pasture it over at Ernie’s place, and I said, “Fine, and you can go with it.”  I meant it, too.  Since then I’ve lived alone, except for those brief times when Marcy was home.

The last time I saw her the way I think of her now, she was fourteen—round, pretty face, long brown hair I used to wash and comb.  I didn’t see her again until she was nineteen and sick, too weak to stand.  “I’m dying, Mama,” is what she told me over the phone, as if there would be no use arguing.  “I need a place to stay for a while.”

She came off the plane in a wheelchair.  A flight attendant rolled her through a dazzle of sun that flooded the glass walls of the terminal, so that she all but vanished in light.  Then she was before me, my daughter—wide blue eyes and crooked smile—wanting to know would I have recognized her.

She was true to her word, about the dying, though at times her body argued otherwise.  Miracle drugs, first one then another, briefly lifted her strength, and for a time she would feel well.  But eventually I had to quit my job to look after her, to feed her and clean the vomit and try, during the bad spells, to keep her in bed.  She wandered.  Even after she lost her sight, she’d often be bumping around the house, disoriented, looking for a door.

Once in winter at midnight, I found her outside in nothing but a nightgown, barefoot in the garden, out of her wits.  “Come inside, love,” I begged, tugging her chilled arm, but she persisted toward the west, chin thrust before her as if it knew the way.  “Why are you so stubborn?  Look where it’s gotten you.”  Instructive, forgetting her blindness, I pointed to the coiled hose where her feet were tangled, the naked, frost-crusted vines climbing the trellis.  But she didn’t know me.  She had somewhere to go, it seemed, and it took me a time to turn her face, to coax her back indoors.  From then on, I put her down each night in my own bed, between my body and the wall.

Nine times in fourteen months I carried her to the emergency room—vomiting, diarrhea, pneumonia, blindness, dementia—words I didn’t know how to attach to my daughter.  An IV went directly into her chest.  A tube served her last meals.  I cleaned her as I had when she was a baby—never, never in all my prayers, did I imagine a child returned this way.  Forty-four different medications, and each one wore itself out, or wore her out, and no sooner one horror banished than another rooted in a new spot, resisting the drugs or caused by the drugs, the internal functions in chaos and shutdown and revolt.

It seemed wrong, after all that, that the one to end it would be a strain of tuberculosis only birds get.  The doctor thought she’d carried it for some time, that she’d probably picked it up from pigeon droppings.  In a city, he said, she could hardly have avoided exposure.  It was in the air that everyone breathed.

This spring, five years after her death, the hummingbirds started showing up.  I find them buzzing along the walls a few inches from the ground or panting in the horses’ bedding, their little feet rimed with cobwebs.  One I found actually caught in a new web, suspended from a crossbeam like some spider’s lunch with its miniature wings outspread.  I looked up, and it blinked—I swear I saw it blink at me with its black pin eyes.

After Marcy died the way she did, I never wanted to touch a bird, any bird.  Dirty things, they seemed.  And these minute visitors so often arrive coated in a filth denser than their own bodies.  But I can’t just leave them to die.  Hummingbirds never touch the earth if they can help it, so once they’re down they must have no capacity to cast off the lint of the world.  Perhaps their bodies even attract it somehow.  But underneath the matted debris, they’re like jewels still; just lift it off and they shimmer again.

I admit it’s a trial to clean a thing so delicate, always feeling that one unfortunate twitch of your finger could crush it beyond repair.  But I always try.  I know some magic too.  This little female I carry up to the house this morning—she’s weaker than most, still partly cocooned, won’t even lift her head to give me a defiant look like some of them do.  On the back porch, I drop two sugar cubes in a coffee mug, add some water, pop the mug into the microwave.  While it warms I use a pair of tweezers, still out here from last time, to remove the remaining cobwebs and one long, dark horsetail hair that has the bird bound like a package.  When she’s free, she lies on her side in my palm, breathing five breaths for every second.

“You’re going to use up your life awful fast at that rate,” I tell her.  They never listen.  “Sorry about kicking you,” I add.  “That probably didn’t help.”

I take the mug out of the microwave and stir the water, then scoop out a teaspoonful.  Specks of sugar are still visible in the spoon’s silver bowl, but I hold it up to the bird anyway, submerge the tip of her reedlike beak.  At first she doesn’t move.  Then her black lash of a tongue flicks out once, experimentally.  Pretty soon the tongue is going like the needle of a sewing machine, ravenous.  I’m freshly amazed.  Even caged in my loose-curled fingers—surely she’s terrified of this giant—the bird knows sugar when she tastes it, knows her body needs it, and she drinks.

For a full minute she drinks, then seems to tire.  She looks at me.  Her stiff, match stick wings are spread against my palm like little flippers, propping her upright—what intricate mechanisms of the body must be required to beat those wings into a blur, to zip quick as a bee to a flower cup and then hover, poised there in startling visibility.  What strength.  I’ve never kicked one across a floor before, can’t imagine the damage.  But I go outside onto the step and open my hand.

There is no moment of waiting, hoping.  Like magic, she rises.  Her wings hum with effort, and her leaving is slow, gradual, as if her body is heavier than she remembers.  But still, she rises, over the barn and past it.  To the limits of vision, she is a dark seed lofted into the morning, and I clap my hands to my face, forgetting the dirtiness of birds.

All I wanted, in the end, was one last drug.  Marcy lay in a hospital bed, her long, clean hair spread on the pillow around her upturned face.  She weighed eighty-two pounds.  She didn’t know me, didn’t know where her body lay, spoke urgently in words—as clear as daylight—that made no human sense.  There has to be another drug, I insisted.  Someone’s lab must hold a cure, newly cooked, experimental, untested.  I’ll take anything.

What a slap from God to see these exhausted birds revived, again and again, with a single spoonful of kitchen sugar.  But I never get tired of it.