Crows

     SHIRLEY ORTHENSTADT IS IN BAD SHAPE by the time Mrs. Miller brings her in: her heart is racing, her toothpick-thin ribcage is jumping up and down, and she is hot–hot like an engine block after a ninety-five mile sprint down the interstate.

I check the mouse’s temperature–too high–and ask Mrs. Miller questions: has Shirley been drinking water? Has Shirley been exposed to anything unusual?

Mrs. Miller is the kind of woman you will see at Kroger buying Wonderbread and applesauce. The kind of woman who buys a watch or a scarf for her grandchild months before the birthday or graduation. Her hair is windblown and a small patch of it lies flat in the back. She trembles as she answers the questions.

I know who Mrs. Miller is: she is the woman whose son died the same year as my mother. The same year it seemed everyone was dying. The year the crows came into our orchards and would not leave.

Shirley Orthenstadt’s cage has cut-out pictures of flowers taped inside.

Mrs. Miller says, “Do what you can, Dr. Pat. I’ve got money.”

I imagine Mrs. Miller and this mouse. I imagine her lying awake at night, listening to the squeak squeak of the wheel as Shirley runs. I can see her cutting the little pictures of flowers out of Good Housekeeping or Woman’s Journal. Folding a piece of tape over and sticking it to the back of a flower. Sticking the flower onto the cage. Saying to the mouse, “There you go, my little Shirley-whirly. My little cheese chewer. My little sweet.”

*****

     Mrs. Miller’s son Jack was the first to go that year–wrapping his ’76 Corvette around a maple on Route 27–and my cousin Bert was the second. Bert’s death sneaked up from behind. He was at a gas station, pumping gas, when a woman in a Ford Granada threw the car into reverse and pinned Bert against the pumps. Both of Bert’s legs were broken. I never visited him in the hospital–I had my mother to care for–but I heard he was doing good. Both legs in casts, but he’d be up and around by and by. Reading auto mechanic magazines and watching cartoons on TV. Doing good, doing fine, until the blood clot found its way to his heart.
One of Bert’s friends sent a flower arrangement in the shape of  VW bug to the funeral home.
The nun who said the eulogy remarked how he and Christ were the same age when they died. But that’s as far as the similarities go. Bert dealt in drugs and he said nigger and I saw him kick a dog once. But for that one day, he was a saint. He had a halo over his head.

*****

     You can’t put a catheter in a mouse. You can’t put in a tiny tube and breathe for the mouse. But you can give the mouse an x-ray. You can test its blood. You can hook it up to an EKG, watch the tiny heartbeat on the screen.

*****

     I live in a household of geriatric cats: Buster, Rumble, and Brandy. Buster and Brandy are going strong, but Rumble is senile. She gets lost in the basement, sometimes, on her way to the litter pan. I have found her wedged behind the washing machine, or in the narrow space between the furnace and hot water heater. I have found her walking in circles in the fruit cellar, coming again and again upon the same rugged walls.
Rumble is obsessive about laps; despite her cataracts, she can spot a lap from a great distance–maybe she can even hear a lap being formed–and she will hobble toward it like there is no tomorrow. Perhaps in her mind, there is no  tomorrow, but if there is, she would like to be in a lap when the tomorrow arrives. She likes to knead my thighs and purr. When I try to rise, she digs in her claws.
I have always been surrounded by animals.
When I was a kid, I bandaged up the mice and birds the neighbor kids brought to me from the fields. I doctored their gerbils and parakeets. I learned about death through the tiny carcass of a baby rabbit I found in our yard–my father had run over it with the mower–but it was when Mrs. Baker’s Boxy got hit by a car that I learned about grief. I witnessed what it did to someone to lose something they love. It wasn’t Boxy’s ravaged body that fascinated me, it was the way Mrs. Baker cried out when she saw it. It was the way she dropped to her knees in the middle of the street and sobbed.

*****

     Shirley Orthenstadt is named after Mrs. Miller’s favorite poet. Mrs. Miller tells me this when she comes in the next afternoon. She is wearing a mauve raincoat and narrow black galoshes; the shoulders of the coat are damp.
“The real Shirley Orthenstadt writes the most beautiful poems,” Mrs. Miller says, shaking out an umbrella. “She writes poems about God, and life, and faith.” As she says this, she looks right at me, and I notice for the first time the high color in her cheeks. The directness of her gaze makes me uncomfortable. Her gray eyes seem almost translucent. I look away.
I’ve had clients come in to visit a cat or a dog. I had a woman come in one day to sit with her parrot after I’d performed a minor beak surgery. I’ve never had anyone come visit a mouse.
I ask my tech to set Mrs. Miller up in one of the examination rooms while I get Shirley’s cage. Shirley has been sleeping and now she is groggy; she stumbles when I lift the cage, falls against the cut-out  picture of a daisy. Mrs. Miller clasps her hands together when I enter the room. She bends over the cage and whispers something that sounds like “There, there. That’s a pumpkin.” She reaches into the cage and cups the mouse in her hands.
Later, when I come back to the room, Mrs. Miller is still there. She is slumped in a plastic chair in the corner, snoring softly, her head resting against the wall. Shirley is nestled in the crook of Mrs. Miller’s elbow, eyes closed, whiskers twitching.
I touch Mrs. Miller on the shoulder, and when that fails to wake her, I give the shoulder a gentle shake. Mrs. Miller’s eyes flutter open and she says, “The hubcap.” She blinks in the glare of the fluorescent light.
I take Shirley from Mrs. Miller and return her to the cage. Mrs. Miller puts on her raincoat. While she buttons the coat, she says, “‘We can cover our heads, bend our backs against pain, but we can never, never hope to stop rain.’”
She tucks an umbrella beneath her arm.
“Shirley wrote that,” she says.

*****

     When I was a kid my neighbors had a mouse. Actually, it was not a mouse; it was a rat: black and white, with a long, skinny tail. The rat was named Pearl. My neighbors had a hermit crab, too, but it did not have a name. Every summer, when they went on vacation, I took care of Pearl and the hermit crab. A note taped to the kitchen cabinet said IF CRAB DIES, THROW IT AWAY. IF RAT DIES, WRAP IN BAGGIE AND PLACE IN FREEZER. A drawing of a stick figure crying was next to the word dies.
I opened the freezer door. I decided the empty space on top of a box of Mrs. Paul’s fishsticks looked good. I checked to see where the baggies were kept. I found them in a drawer next to the sink.

******

     Shirley Orthenstadt’s x-ray reveals that she has a butt mass, not uncommon in an older mouse. Her blood work lets me know she has an infection. I can operate on the butt mass, but first I have to clear up the infection. I give her an antibiotic and watch her curl into a ball and go to sleep. Her eyelids flutter and her whiskers pulse. What are mouse dreams made of? It is not the first time I have wondered this. Shirely’s front paw twitches. Perhaps somewhere in her rodent mind, she is reaching, and in the phrases which make up mouse-speak, she is saying Give me that cheese. Give it to me. Give me that cheese now.

******

     In the evening, I feed my own and then I watch TV. I like the sit-coms and the commercials–especially the one with the talking dog–but sometimes I watch videos. In Shirley’s honor, I decide to watch a video titled “Space Rats.” An animal rights group mailed it to me a few years ago, but I have never watched it. I settle on the couch and prop my feet on the coffee table. Rumble–who has been following my actions with keen observance since dinnertime–makes a bee-line for the lap. She kneads her paws into my leg and does her namesake: rumbles.
The video begins with a shot of several report covers–the titles in stark typography–with topics ranging from tolerance of heat in aircraft, to effects of cosmic radiation, to the physiology of a subgravity state–that sort of thing. One of the reports is called Basic Requirements for Survival of Mice in a Sealed Atmosphere. I think of Shirley in her flowered cage.
There are no mice at first. There are pictures of other animals: dogs and hamsters, a monkey dressed in a space suit strapped into a vinyl seat, a brace of hogs attached to a long cylinder. There are images of hollow chambers and needles and space rockets. There are voice-overs, such as This monkey is in for the trip of a lifetime and The dog knew we weren’t going to hurt him.
There’s a photograph of a man injecting dye into the eyes of insects, another of him placing the insects into a test-tube. The voice-over proclaims After you stare enough fruit flies straight in the eye you start to have hallucinations.
Finally, the mice appear. There are photographs of them treading air in space, weightless and serene. They seem to know no confusion. They seem not to notice the lack of gravity. The camera catches them in a moment of equanimity, where nothing tugs at them, pulls at them, holds them down. Certainly, they are unaware that in moments they will crash into the earth with a terrific impact.
The experiment is called a success–the camera having survived.

*****

     More than once, before my mother fell and broke her hip and could not walk, I’d wake in the early morning hours and know that she was gone. I tried bolting the locks at night and dragging chairs in front of the doors. I tried hanging cow bells on the handles. Still, she always got out, and I’d look through my bedroom window to see her in the gray morning light, wandering among the pear trees, or pacing the narrow strip of land behind the chicken coop where the asparagus patch used to be.
Once, I looked out to see her sitting on one of the ornamental deer beside the garden, gazing into the corn.
I would put on my shoes and walk into the yard. My mother’s eyes glistened beneath the fading stars, like when she used to sing. She always startled when I touched her arm. Standing there surrounded by trees and buildings shrouded in mist, I half expected her to belt out the first notes of “Hey Diddle Dee” or “Moonlight.” Most of the time, she said nothing; she simply lifted her feet over the damp grass as I guided her toward our house, where in the kitchen I would dry her feet with a towel and tuck them into slippers.
But one morning when I took her arm, she turned and glared at me. “The bathroom,” she said, her voice loud in the morning stillness. “Where the hell is the bathroom?”

*****

     The third person to die that year was Sam Spry. He was the father of one of my clients, Missy Spry. The things I remember about Sam Spry are that he had a large belly and he roared like a lion whenever he took the first drink from a can of soda. He liked to sneak up on the neighborhood kids when they camped out in backyards and wail like a ghost. He had a dog named Peanut. Mostly, I remember, he was a kind man.
Missy was away at college when the accident happened. I ran into her at the bakery when she came home for the funeral, but I did not know what to say; I’m sorry seemed so pedestrian, given how her father died: he was crushed against a brick wall by a forklift at the furniture warehouse where he worked. He did not shout out, or flail his arms, and the operator of the forklift never knew he was there.
I bought two cinnamon rolls and left the bakery without saying a word.
The casket at Sam Spry’s funeral was closed. Crows perched in the trees across from the church. I remember how restless they were, rustling their feathers and leaping from branch to branch; we could hear them cawing throughout the service. The funeral attendants closed the doors, but we could still hear the cries through the stained glass windows. I remember looking down and seeing a black feather on the marble floor of the church during the blessing. Missy Spry’s younger sister reached down and picked the feather up and tucked it into a hymnal. Her mother saw her do it but she looked away.

*****

Mrs. Miller is in the waiting room–two thin walls away–thumbing through the pages of a recent Pet Gazette. She has a blue and yellow scarf tied over her hair and is wearing sturdy, black shoes. The receptionist told me Mrs. Miller was here. I glanced at her from the hallway, but I did not speak; she peered into the magazine, her fingers trembling as she turned a page.
Mrs. Miller has her umbrella even though there is no rain.
I have a cat to de-claw this morning, and a beagle to spay, but for the moment, Shirley is everything. She is laid out on the sterile table, belly up, paws in the air, zonked out completely. She is a picture of vulnerability. I think of hawks and owls as I make the first incision. I think of snakes. I think of the time I was at a pet store and the woman in line in front of me was there to return five mice she had bought. The mice were in a box like a Chinese food carry-out container with holes, with the words SOMEBODY LOVES ME, I’VE FOUND A HOME! stenciled on its side in red. “Please put these in a different box,” the woman had said. “They are for my boyfriend’s boa.” There are greater dangers in the world than this tiny scalpel; I have often thought so.
I  listen to music when I do surgeries; today it is Brahms. A Sonata in e minor for cello and piano murmurs from the speaker above my shoulder; I hum along. Everything about the surgery goes well: the tumor bisects in a clean, solid mass; the monitor never falters; the loss of blood is minimal. As I prepare to do the suture, a dog in the hallway begins to bark–short, sharp yaps that repeat at precise intervals. I hear a tech trying to hush the dog, saying, “No, no. It’s okay. You’ll be fine. No, no.”
I stitch Shirley up like a little present I will give to Mrs. Miller–a little present with beating heart and whiskers. I peel off the surgical gloves and wash my hands. The final notes of the sonata sound. Shirley jerks as she begins to come out from under anesthesia. The barks in the hallway turn into a whimper: low and quiet and full of yearning.
Mrs. Miller is reading an article about hairless cats when I step into the waiting room; I can see the photograph of one of these cats, smooth and fur-free, wrinkles running over its skin like furrows in soil. The cat’s tail is long and skinny, like Pearl the Rat’s. Mrs. Miller closes the magazine as I approach. “Shirley is A-OK,” I say, and Mrs. Miller smiles.

*****

     My mother hated rats. She scrunched up her face at the word rat. If I said, “Eeee, eeee,” she grimaced. She told me one day, as I was stirring a bowl of vegetable soup to cool it for her, about the time in the outhouse.
“A raa,” she said.
I said, “A rat?”
“Cay ow ah the ole.”
“Came out of the hole?”
She nodded.
When I was a kid, my mother checked the toilets, no matter where we were: at home, at Howard Johnson’s, at a restaurant far from home.
A rat came out of the hole.

*****

     I am eating a provolone cheese sandwich in my office when I hear Mrs. Miller’s voice in the lobby. I leave the sandwich on my desk and retrieve Shirley’s cage. “She’s groggy,” I say, setting the cage on the counter. “She should be back to normal in a few days.”
Mrs. Miller pokes a finger through the bars of the cage and gently prods the mouse. Shirley rises and sniffs the air. Her belly is shaved and a zig-zag of tiny stitches runs across it.
“The stitches will dissolve in a week or so,” I say.
“‘Bless those who care for creatures small,’” Mrs. Miller recites. “‘They will inherit the earth, the sky, the mountains tall.’”  She gives the top of the cage a light tap. “Thank you,” she says.
I watch from my office window as Mrs. Miller opens the passenger door of her car; she arranges Shirley’s cage on the seat and straps it in with the seat belt. She settles herself into the driver’s seat, leans over and says something to Shirley. Then she backs out of the parking space–braking frequently to check that no one is behind her–and drives the car through the parking lot, her head bent toward the windshield, both hands clutching the steering wheel.
I know this about the accident that took the life of Mrs. Miller’s son: the young man riding in the passenger seat did not die. He lived for years, strapped into a wheelchair. His mother rolled him through the streets of our town, stopping to talk to neighbors she passed. The young man’s head lolled against his shoulder and his eyes gazed blankly at the sky. “He knows what I say,” his mother said. “He blinked at me today.” Years after the accident, the son succumbed to pneumonia in a hospital room downtown.
I always thought Mrs. Miller was the luckier of the two.

*****

     IF CRAB DIES, THROW IT AWAY. IF RAT DIES, WRAP IN BAGGIE AND PLACE IN FREEZER.

*****

     The afternoon my mother died, she gazed through the window from her bed and whispered, “Crows.” I looked to the place in the sky where her gaze rested, but all I saw were clouds. She asked for a cup of tea. I boiled the water and steeped a bag of Earl Grey. I added a little milk. I carried the cup in to her room, but in the time it took to make the tea, she had died. I stood in the doorway of her room, startled by the sudden emptiness in her face: her eyes stared at the window, fixed and horrified, as if she had witnessed the departure of her own soul.
For hours that day and the next, I stood at her bedroom window, searching for crows. I saw shadows and leaves and squirrels. I saw a strip of tattered plastic snagged on a tree branch. I saw the long drawn out trails planes sometimes leave behind. But I did not see any crows.

*****

     An envelope arrives at my office a few days after Mrs. Miller has taken Shirley home. The envelope is addressed to me, in a patient, old-fashioned script; a cut-out picture of a sunflower is pasted over the seal. Inside is a typed poem:

The Greatest Creature

Some say elephants are the finest creatures to see,
Others claim whales beneath the sea,
Some praise eagles soaring high,
And some the giraffe with her head in the sky.
But I say true, without a doubt,
The greatest creature within or without,
Is the one that by my side does stay,
To comfort and save me through night and day.

At the bottom of the page, in the same shaky script in which the envelope is addressed, Mrs. Miller has written “Thanks for saving my everything,” and signed her name.
I tack the poem to the wall beside the photographs of dogs and cats my clients have given me. It smells faintly of lavender.

*****

     Pearl the rat did not die and the hermit crab did not die, but another summer, at another neighbor’s house, I walked in to find Josh the cat face down on the stove, stiff and cold and bristly. Mrs. Berger cried when I called her in New Mexico. She asked if I would wrap Josh’s body in a garbage bag and put it in the freezer. She said the garbage bags were in a cabinet beneath the sink. She said she and her husband would be home on Sunday.
What she did not say was: there is already a cat in the freezer. This other cat was frozen solid. This other cat’s tail was hard and straight like a handle. This other cat was surrounded by cartons of ice cream and packages of meat. There was no room for another cat in that freezer. I removed one of the metal shelves. I stood the frozen cat on its head, angled its tail toward the back of the freezer. I moved aside some brown bread–dated June 1976–and a package of venison burgers. I tucked Josh’s body into the space I had made. Once he was in, there was no room for anything else.

Originally published in Black Warrior Review

Copyright © 1999 Cynthia Riede