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Sugar Birds

By Cheryl Grey Bostrom

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Northwest Washington State, 1985

CHAPTER 1 ~ AGGIE
Mama

“ You stay on the ground, Agate!”
Aggie scowled as her mother shouted across thirty rows of foot-high corn. Teeth clamped, the girl slammed her gloves into a bucket, then lengthened her stride until she reached the four-wheeler beside the barn. The words lay sharp against her spine. Mama must have seen her eye the crow’s nest near the alders they cut that morning. Of course she did.

Without looking back, the girl cranked the engine and revved the throttle. The tires skidded sideways, spewing gravel behind her before they caught and fishtailed into the pasture in a streak of crushed grass. The machine bucked uphill across uneven ground—too fast, she knew—but the engine’s whine would drown out anything else Mama might yell.

When she crested the rise, she dropped the throttle into an idle and ran her eyes along the ridges of the North Cascades, their slopes blue beneath the snowline. Then she shifted side- ways in her seat to look back toward her family’s log house, the cupola-topped cedar barn, and the garden. Shrunken in the distance, her parents bent over baby onions in the June afternoon sunshine, weeding. Beyond them, sprinklers irrigated the tree seedlings Aggie had been hoeing since lunch. She clenched her arms and felt the ache in them, thankful that Dad called her off the job to retrieve the chainsaw he’d left in the woods.

She drove down the back side of the hill, nosed the vehicle alongside a pile of firewood rounds, and clicked off the ignition. As if dismounting a horse, she swung her leg behind her and jumped to the ground, then trotted toward the Douglas fir that held the nest. Mama expected her to find Dad’s saw and return right away. Nothing else. No climbing.

But her mother would never know. Aggie could make it up and down the tree in under five minutes and be home with the saw before either parent missed her.
Her eyes crawled up the old fir to a dark cluster of twigs, where a sharp-beaked silhouette brooded her eggs. The male crow watched Aggie from an adjacent tree and bobbed to his mate, who waddled from the nest and hopped to a nearby branch. Aggie tilted her head at them and pressed her finger to her lips. “Nothing to worry about,” she whispered. “I just want to see ’em.” The fir was an easy one; the nest only the height of a telephone pole. She had scaled trees like this, what, a hundred times? Five hundred?

With no sign of Mama, she entered the tree, her feet and hands deliberate as she climbed, her movements brisk. Boughs heavy with needles offered a quick ladder. The silent crows watched, squatting, wings poised, their necks stretched low.
Halfway up, the foliage grew sparser, and her heart raced at her high visibility. If Mama had followed, she would spot her for sure. Aggie picked up her pace, planting her foot on a limb the diameter of her wrist and, without testing its strength, pulled her full fifty-five pounds onto it.

The limb snapped. A flailing arm snagged a branch and she dangled, scrambling for toeholds. Both birds squawked and took to the sky, spreading the alarm. Startled sparrows launched from the grass below as the crows circled and dove. Aggie found her footing and braced against the onslaught. When a beak speared her shoulder, she pawed the air behind her, intercepted a crow across its breast and flung it sideways. Both birds arced skyward, protesting as she hoisted herself to the bowl of the nest and peered inside.

There, arranged in a circle like the petals of a flower, the olive-green eggs’ narrow tips touched at the center. “Five,” she said to the raucous, hovering birds—and stuck her thumb in the air.

A thrill surged through her. In two weeks she’d begin to visit daily. Though the crows were sure to jab her a few more times, they’d get used to her, like they all did. When she watched their first egg hatch, she’d memorize it and draw the cracked shell and emerging beak. She’d record every hatchling in her book, just like Dad taught her.

Now, though, she had to move fast, and the fir’s twiggy branches slowed her descent. A young birch, skinny and limb- less as a fire pole, intersected a bough below her. Yes. The birch would give her a straight shot to the ground. She sidestepped along a horizontal limb until it narrowed dangerously, then leaned into the thin tree, caught the trunk and swung her weedy body over. With a bear cub’s grip, she shinnied lower—until a shriek ricocheted through the woods.

“Aggie!”

The crows vanished into the trees. Still clamped around the trunk, Aggie arched backwards as her mother appeared. Even upside down, she saw fright scrape across Mama’s face, and it lodged like a stone in Aggie’s chest. She jumped the last few feet out of the tree and stood on one leg like a heron, her eyes locked on her mother’s knees.

Mama gripped Aggie’s chin. “How many times have I told you not to climb so high? After yesterday, I thought you under- stood. Tsch. Ten years old. Still can’t trust you.” She jerked Aggie’s jaw higher, her eyes blazing. “No more. Starting tomor- row, you will either stay within visible range of me or you will help Aunt Nora at the dairy while your dad and I are working. Someone has to keep an eye on you.”

Aggie eased away from Mama and studied the ground. Her aunt rarely left her airless house and never opened her curtains. She would have to do their dishes. Clean those dingy rooms. And who knew when Uncle Loomis would sneak up on her and yell if she messed up. She wondered how her brother could stand to milk for him.
The alternative was no better. Tethered to Mama, she’d feel like a mouse with an owl overhead. And her parents would fight about her.

“But Mama. I wasn’t—”

“You are going to break your neck. Or worse.”

Aggie’s face burned hot with something more than Mama’s fear. She felt like spitting. Spitting at her mother who was trying to steal her joy over eggs, her joy at running up a tree into the sky. She crossed her arms and turned sideways to Mama, who again reached for her, more gently this time.

Aggie dodged her. From now on, she would climb only when she and Dad worked on the far edge of their eighty acres. Or when her mother kneaded bread dough or bought groceries or shipped seeds. Aggie would chart nests deeper in the woods than ever before, or along the Hawley River—where Mama wouldn’t look. And if Mama came after her? She would be a squirrel and skitter through the trees like one. Way higher than before.

Her father approached over the hill, and Aggie ducked behind a fat, leaning alder. She did not want him to witness her anger, this awful feeling that made her mouth pinch and her head hurt above her ears.

Mama watched her hide, then turned toward her dad. “Harris!”

“I saw her.”

“How many times will you see her and do nothing? Wasn’t yesterday enough? From now on, that girl stays out of trees.”

Yesterday. Big whoop. Aggie had found a nest of red-shafted flickers, only twenty-five feet up. Dad didn’t worry at all.

“I always look after her, Bree.”

“How can you look after her when she’s on a branch as high as our house?”

Aggie pictured their two-story log home, with its steep gables. She had never considered the size of her trees in comparison.

“Like you did better keeping her at the barn with you? How’d that work for you?”

Exactly, Dad. Mama really overreacted that time. Hadn’t she pulled herself into the cupola with a strong rope, over the cushy straw in the haymow? Baby stuff. So safe.

And she’d found six barn swallow eggs in that flawless mud cup.

Her mother’s cheeks flushed. “You are her father. You can’t let her win.”

“This isn’t about winning. You’re strangling the girl. If you keep treating her like she’s five, she’ll never grow up.”

“She won’t be doing any growing if she lands on her head.”

Aggie strained to listen as he lowered his voice. “. . . hardly growing now. Doctor charts don’t lie.” He stroked his stubbled chin. “Look, Bree. What if we send her back to school in the fall? She hasn’t been around anyone her age in a year. Maybe this time she’ll—”

Mama threw her hands in the air, then spun away from him and strode fast toward the house.

. . . make some friends. Aggie finished her father’s sentence, mouthing the words and stretching out f-r-i-e-n-d-s. She didn’t like the boys at school. James Marking had called her a freak when she picked up those baby possums crawling on their road-killed mama in front of the gym. So what if she put them in her sweatshirt pouch and took them to class. So what if she pretended to be a marsupial until she got them home. They’d have died otherwise.

She didn’t like the girls, either—especially big Trina Boonsma, who had flunked fourth grade twice and scared Aggie on the playground. Trina stalked her at church, too. Good thing Aggie was quick, or, she suspected, Trina would have kept pinching her privates in that hallway behind the sanctuary. Aggie had shown Mama the bruises Trina left on her chest, but she never expected her mother to block Trina and Mrs. Boonsma right there in the foyer after the service.

“Tell that cow of yours to keep her hands to herself!” Mama had waved the church bulletin in Mrs. Boonsma’s face. Twenty heads snapped toward her. Mrs. Boonsma pulled Trina close.

Dad reached Mama through the crowd, caught her arm,and extracted the tube from her hand. “Terribly sorry.” He tipped his head at Mrs. Boonsma, then Trina. “Bree hasn’t been herself lately.”

“No way I—” Her mother wrenched, but Dad’s grip held.

“Not the time or place, love. Let’s go.” He spun Mama—almost like he did when they danced in the barn to the radio—and hurried her outside. By the time Aggie and her brother got to the car, Mama was shouting, smacking the dashboard with Dad’s worn leather Bible. “We’re done with church.” Whack. “Done, done, done.” Whack. “Can’t keep my children safe anywhere.” Her father had flinched with every swat.

No school and no more town church meant no more Trina. Aggie was relieved. Mama’s erratic behavior was worry enough. Besides, kitchen church was way better. And short, usually; she and her brother recited the week’s memory work
from the catechism, Dad read Scripture. Aggie would sing from their Psalter Hymnal while Dad jazzed it up with a Celtic riff or two on his fiddle. Sometimes she even danced on the linoleum, where her feet clacked out the rhythm.
Besides, who needed school for friends? Aggie found real friends in the woods. Birds. Raccoons. Trees. And homeschool took less time.

In a way, Mama had recovered. At least now she no longer rolled her wild eyes, shouting at people she hardly knew. She worked in the garden again. Mailed out packages wrapped in kraft paper, with Hayes Heirloom Seeds stamped in the corner.
Her mother did, however, yell when Aggie climbed.

If only she had waited to visit the crows.

Her father, his hands hanging, watched Mama stomp up the hill, swiping hip-high orchard grass out of her way. He nodded to Aggie’s hiding place. “Let’s head home, my girl.” He strapped the chainsaw into the basket behind the ATV’s seat. “You practicing everything I taught you out there?”

“Yes, Dad. I think about it all the time.” At least the parts that interested her. Like tracking animals. And bird calls. And, usually, checking tree branches for soundness.

“Good. Good. One way or another, we’ll figure out how you can grow those wings of yours without testing God—or your mom. No need to dare either of them to keep you alive.”

“She doesn’t get it.”

He leaned against the machine’s fender and crossed his arms. “Actually, I think she does.” He looked past Aggie at Mama’s retreating form. “She just doesn’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Dad. She even worries when I eat grapes.”

“Being a mother has distracted her.” Her father plucked a leaf from her hair. “Those jars of agates in the kitchen? Ever ask her about them?”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Ask her about that cliff in Oregon. And those waves. If she had fallen . . .” He whistled a descending note, like in a cartoon before someone crashed. “See if she’ll tell you that story.”

“I don’t know how that’ll help.”

“Your mom hunted those stones like you hunt nests. Insisted we name you after them.”

So her mother could scale cliffs to find rocks, but she wouldn’t let Aggie climb trees? Her face grew hot again.

Dad mounted the four-wheeler and patted the seat behind him, and Aggie clambered on. “Eggs like daisy petals in that nest, Dad. Five of ’em.” She clamped her arms around his sides and laid her cheek against his shirt. He steered up the hill after her angry mother.

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