The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree Read Online Free PDF

into the mike and said, “We won the battle, guys. Here’s hoping we win the war!”
    I smiled back at them. Their enthusiasm was infectious—I felt a little excited to be part of this. And then the enormity of the task before me came rushing back in a blast wave of fear.

 
     
     
    Ravens and Writing Desks

     
     
    A FTER THE VIEWING, I STOOD alone at the side of my father’s coffin, looking down at his aged body with a growing sense of sadness that threatened to eat at my edges. Conflicting emotions warred with each other.
    Regret, at never bothering to get to know him better, at never closing that gap he created himself. Anger, at myself, for just writing him off as a reclusive hack. Anger at him for disappearing from my life until now. Satisfaction at having an opportunity for achieving something wonderful thrust onto me.
    A cool, hollow void where a great weeping sorrow should have been at losing my father.
    “I don’t think for a moment that talent is genetic,” I told the man in the coffin. “I’m no writer! At least not the kind of writer that twenty thousand people sign a petition over. I am definitely not my father’s son. What the hell am I going to do?”
    My father said nothing, of course. The broadsword he clutched in his spotted hands gleamed bright, blinding bright, in the dusty light of the octagon window in the back wall where the slopes of the roof met. I turned around to what I thought was an empty viewing room and Bayard was standing there with his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket.
    He stepped toward me and hugged me out of sympathy. I surprised myself by being grateful for it. He took off his rose-colored Thompson glasses and hung them by one stem from the collar of his shirt, and regarded me with ancient eyes. The ponderous bags under his watery hound-dog eyes made him look thirty years older.
    “When I was a kid,” Bayard said, with a vague, wistful smile, “I came walking out of the town library and saw something big and black in the grass next to the sidewalk. I went to go see what it was and it turned out to be a raven, lying there on his back, looking up at me and cawing. I guess it got hit by a passing car and knocked onto the median.
    “Well, that big dumb bird let me pick him up and carry him home. He had a busted wing and a broken leg. My dad, he was a doctor, he had a little clinic in Ohio, he helped me put splints on that raven.”
    I smirked in spite of myself. “Does this story have a point?”
    Bayard took a box of Camels out of his pocket and started packing them against the palm of his hand. “Walk outside with me.”
    We hung out in the funeral home carport. Golden rays of sunlight filtered through the filthy washrag clouds and lit up the green leaves of the dogwoods flanking the driveway. The listless hiss and roar of oblivious traffic passing on the street down the hill was soothing in its detachment.
    The literary agent lit a cigarette, took a deep draw, and blew the smoke across the carport in a thin stream. “A couple months later, that fat-assed raven was one hundred percent back to health. I didn’t want to, but my dad made me take him outside and let him go.
    “No matter what I did, he absolutely would not leave. I shook the shit out of that dumb bird trying to get him off my arm. He knew he had a good thing and he didn’t want to leave. I took him out every day that week trying to let him go and he refused to do it.”
    I gave him a Clint Eastwood squint from the corner of my eye and folded my arms. “Are you about to tell me that that bird never forgot how to fly and if I just believe in myself and quit resting on my laurels expecting the world to hand me a living, I can fly too?”
    “A few days later he got ahold of my brother and tore him up, so my dad had to take him out and shoot him,” Bayard said, flicking his ashes onto the carport floor. “I’m telling you that if you don’t start flying, I’m going to shoot you.”
    I laughed and