In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau

Magpie in the Window

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MagpieintheWindow O n a kitchen floor spread with newspapers, I am gutting a pumpkin. Buried to the elbow in bright flesh, stripping its innards, I scrape the hollowing carcass to make a lantern or a lamp, as so many parents before me have done. If I gut the pumpkin well, the outcome will prove spooky, the way my toddler Reed hopes it will be. He does his part by picking out the seeds. The juicy flesh and pulp have made my fingers too slippery for such work. I hunch over, grunt as I cut, getting into it. Once Halloween has passed, we will eat this pumpkin, even though we could easily get by without it. We could purchase a pie, or cook one from a tin can packed with pureed mash. Instead we chose to grow this horse-faced jack-o-lantern from a seed then pluck it from frost-shriveled vines. We are cleaning and preparing it as we might field-dress an animal we’d raised from a suckling or killed with a bullet in a forest or a field. I grunt and thump on the pumpkin shell. It sounds wonderfully like a drum. Reed grins, shoulders in, and thumps it too. The pumpkin’s scent wafts up, an oily funk as gamy as the birds I used to hunt this time of year. The slimy seeds and strings remind me of giblets and intestines—without the blood to wash from the field jacket, or the shot to sift from the flesh when it hits our plates. The waxy white and oblong seed husks yield sweet pepitas, the meat inside the shields. We roast whole seeds with oil and sea salt until they crunch, just as I used to roast the livers and hearts of quail, pheasants, and grouse. With the pumpkin there’s no worry about catching avian flu, no messy aftereffects of wounding a bird and watching it escape. Reed, a fussy feeder who often refuses meat, has eaten pumpkin seeds we’ve roasted in the oven before, pronouncing them as yummy as peanuts. 64 Magpie in the Window I wash my hands and arms in the kitchen sink. The slime and fibers , easier to cleanse than blood, slip down the sluice. I watch them swirl and remember the waste of pain that came with the killing field. Gary Snyder has a line in his poem “The Hudsonian Curlew” about three shots to get two birds: “one went down on the water / and started to swim. / I didn’t want another thing like that duck (emphasis in original).” Decades follow the slippery filaments in the drain. When I look up from the pumpkin, a magpie is perching outside the kitchen window. It cocks its head and gazes through the pane. I would like to say it begins springing up and down, up and down, abandoning itself to entire delight like James Wright’s blue jay, con- fident that the branch will not break. But this is an everyday magpie, no more or less resilient than a human with a hangover. It peers at us through the kitchen glass. It flicks its lengthy tail. The magpie would eat pumpkin seeds if given a chance, but members of its Corvidae family favor gut piles and dead flesh. They feed on carrion and road kill. Earlier this week I saw a pair of kindred starlings. They darted from a curb amid morning traffic to peck at a puddle, and then back to the curb when the traffic hurried them away. What were they doing? I slowed and leaned to see. Their attention was focused on a small pond of vomit. Some sick soul crossing the thoroughfare had puked up his meal, and it would not go to waste. Call it nature’s economy. The starling rose in esteem for me just then. When I was Reed’s age, a gabbing farm wife had grabbed a rifle in her living room mid-sentence and leaned against an open door for support. She squinted through the smoke of the cigarette in her lips, squeezed the trigger, and dropped a magpie from a cherry tree, then stood the gun on its butt and took a lengthy drag. She inhaled it deep before picking up the conversation. Her name was Laurel Kellogg. Behind her house that spring, I set my sights on capturing a magpie for a pet. Maybe I was hoping to save it from her. Conventional wisdom said...