Another Burial

I took the two owl pellets we found in the nesting box to the Lancaster house the next day.  I had told Boyce Jr. on the telephone that I’d let him dissect the pellets in order to pull out as many of Antonio’s bones as we could find.  Boyce Jr. was excited about the whole thing, and sometimes he’d point the tweezers and Xacto-knife in the air and tremble all over.  I hadn’t seen him this excited since Boyce bought him a sticker for his guitar case that read, “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.”  Boyce Jr. didn’t know what that means anymore than I did, but he knew the word “kills,” so he was thrilled. 

An owl pellet is a clump of hair, bone, plant matter, and other assorted debris that the owl can’t digest.  He has to vomit it in order to avoid a bowel obstruction.  Boyce Jr. was therefore, under my tutelage, separating small parts of several animals in order to get what there existed of Antonio.  To the right on a white piece of paper we assembled an Antonio skeleton and feather pile, and every time we got an easily recognizable part like an upper beak or part of the skull, Boyce Jr. made a kind of nutso laugh from deep in his sinuses. 

It made me think of disassembling owl pellets with my father when I was a little child.  I wouldn’t get to laugh like Boyce Jr. did, and to be fair, I never really wanted to.  My father had his thick glasses on and was huddled over the pellet.  He’d pull the bones out of the pellets and ask me to assemble the animals, whether it was a mouse, chipmunk, or bird.  Then I’d go to school and my kindergarten teacher would ask me what I did over the weekend.  I always said, “I played football,” because that’s what my father told me I should say.  Once, in the second grade, I heard some kids talking about whether their fathers could slam dunk a basketball or not.  I mistakenly thought one of them made eye contact with me in order to invite me into the conversation, so I blurted out that my father and I regularly disassembled the regurgitated materials of owls.  One of the kids took my shirt off and choked me with it.  Other than that, I always said, “I played football.”

While Boyce Jr. was trying to figure out some of the bone patterns from the pellet, Boyce asked me why I tied Antonio up.  I only had a matter of hours before I returned him and altered The Thunderbirds for the better.  “The options are either you didn’t want to see that group banning bird ownership, or you really wanted Antonio to die.  You didn’t have to give him back to that lady.  You could have tried harder to find him a home.” 

I told both Sammy and Boyce that I knew what was best for Antonio, and that he wanted to go.  There wasn’t any way better for him than those Eastern Screech Owls.  Charlotte waited for Sammy and Boyce to get distracted by smelling the pellet to say to me, “It’s getting worse.”  Maybe I would have got mad at her for saying that—I don’t know, I’ve never been mad at Charlotte—but she said right afterward, “I could use some Pizza Rolls,” and god, I could, too.  So I ignored what she had said and listened to Boyce Jr. cackle and shake a leg bone in the tweezers.

When Boyce Jr. was put to bed and I had eaten my fill of rolled pizza goodness, the three of us took Antonio’s remains out to Roger Malvin Country Club.  We buried him next to Hank’s tombstone and I pulled out of my bag some drinks and a book that Rachel had given me.  It’s called Bright Wings, and it’s a book of poems about birds with paintings by the bird-maestro himself, David Allen Sibley.  I gave the book to Sammy and told him to read one because he could do it better than me.  He tried to find a poem about a lovebird but there wasn’t one, so he did the next best thing and found one about an owl.  “Antonio was a sport.  He wouldn’t mind,” Sammy said.  Then he read “The Owl” by Edward Thomas:

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

When Rachel got me that book I really only paid attention to the Sibley art, despite the fact that she wrote on the first page, "I know you're only going to look at the Sibley art, but poetry is people trying to sound like birds."  I've never heard a bird song sound remotely like a person saying big words in strange order, but it was a gift from Rachel so I didn't mind the inaccuracy. 

I couldn't concentrate to understand the poem but I did like the sound of Sammy reading it.  I raised my bottle and said, “That’s nicer than anything we read at my mother’s funeral,” and we drank.  My mother’s funeral was just my uncle and I in the middle of the night burying her ashes by the flagpole of a Ruby Tuesday’s as she requested.  She also requested me to read the following note when we finished: “Nothing but crabgrass going to grow on this patch.  Up your ass, Applebee’s.” My uncle and I were unsure if my mother was confused about which restaurant had wronged her, or if she simply wanted to defame another eatery after her death. Either way, the poem for Antonio was a lot nicer.