The Dove

They flew straight from a wedge of trees east of the field. When the men shot, air cracked open. My brother and I pressed our ears tight, trying to close out the sharp noise. We watched the birds plummet, marking their fall, and ran across dirt-plowed fields. The grooves were deep. We couldn’t get the footing to run faster. Usually the birds were already dead. Eyes glassy. Feathers smudged. Sometimes they waved and flopped, and we had to squeeze them in our hands, run back with feathers tickling palms. One of the men would grab a neck, swing the bird by its head. Broken neck, fast dead. It was best.

One day I brought back a dove barely wounded. I wouldn’t hand her over; she was mine to save. My father rummaged in the barn for an old wire chicken coop. I found a shaded place for the coop and slid a bowl of water in through the little door, faded yellow t-shirt on the ground. I set Taffeta inside. That’s what I’d named her: Taffeta, like my blue Christmas dress.

The next morning I woke early, wanting to hold her on my hand like a trained falcon, listen to the vibrating chortle-coo a dove makes. The wire coop looked undisturbed, the little door was closed, only Taffeta’s head had been separated from her body, strung together now by the red threads of blood vessels and bloody cords. Something had mutilated her, some slick still-breathing animal probably crouching or slinking back against the oak tree, against the flutter of leaves, body damp and hungry. I ran home like you do when you set something up to be killed. How kind a neat head-wringing seemed then, how clean a quick-snap broken neck.