Blackbird by Tom Wright Read Free Book Online Page A

by my suffering. The first thing he’d said to me after introducing himself was, ‘So, Jim, how’s it feel to piss on your own grave?’
    Now: ‘Sounds like Kat and your folks really hit it off from the start – ’
    I said, ‘That was then – ’
    ‘Humour me,’ he said. ‘Where did things go from there?’
    Kat and I had been seeing each other every day since the District game, and I’d proudly introduced her to Johnny, the miserably envious Daz, and pretty much everybody else I knew. We rode the far places of the farm in Indian summer, past grazing Brangus and Charolais and sunning broodmares watching us with patient eyes, under windmills that creaked like cellar doors in their tireless turning, through woods as high and silent as cathedrals, across pasturelands where the wind ran through the grass in waves that chased and overran and re-crossed each other until they lost themselves in the hills.
    On a golden Saturday afternoon we let the horses graze as we lay back under the old willows by the Far Pond listening to the goggle-eyes take insects from the smooth surface with little smacking sounds. Pale peach and ivory coloured clouds piled on themselves to the highest reaches of the sky, and the gently sloping bluegreen fields stretched away endlessly into the long afternoon. The heartbroken call of a dove drifted across the water from the cottonwoods along the opposite shore, and swallows dipped, climbed and turned in the cooling air.
    Without opening her eyes Kat said, ‘It’s really sweet being out here. How far are we from the house?’
    ‘About three and a half miles.’
    ‘Wow. How much of it is the farm?’
    ‘Everything you can see from here. A little over nine thousand acres.’
    ‘Must be a lot of work.’
    ‘Sometimes.’
    Pointing to the cupped brown nests in the dry cattail stalks fringing the shallow end of the pond, she said, ‘Did blackbirds build those?’
    ‘Yeah, redwings,’ I said. ‘Soldier-birds, some people call them, because of those little stripes on their shoulders.’
    ‘We have them back home,’ Kat said. ‘At least I think they’re the same. But I’ve never seen them up close like this – they’re beautiful.’
    ‘They say some of the Indians thought they called people away from life, like “Time’s up”, off to the Happy Hunting Ground or something.’
    ‘Then we better not listen.’
    Kat played classical guitar, and sometimes brought her Ibañez along on our rides. She’d make up songs about things that caught her attention along the way, like the one she called ‘What Colour Is Time?’, about the green hills around us and how long they’d been there, waiting and watching for other colours to come.
    Another time she told me about having a nanny named Estrella from Guadalajara when she was a little girl, and asked me in perfect Spanish how I learned the language.
    ‘Mainly just hanging around with the hands – a lot of them are from Mexico,’ I said. ‘ Porque lo preguntas? ’
    ‘I’ve heard you and your family talking to them,’ she said. ‘ Es una lengua hermosa. Es un mundo hermoso aqui .’
    And she was right. I looked away across the fields and valleys, thinking about how beautiful it all was and wondering why I’d never seen it like this before.
    She made a couple of tuning adjustments on the guitar, strummed and chorded randomly for a while, then found her key. ‘There’s about a thousand versions of this one,’ she said. ‘See if you’ve heard it like this – Estrella used to sing it to me sometimes, like a lullaby.’
    Ay, ay, ay, ay
Canta y no llores
Porque cantando se alegran,
Cielito Lindo, los corazones .
    Este Cielito Lindo
Lindo Cielito que canto aqui
Viene de la huasteca cielito lindo
Solo por ti
    Que tu estas dentro
Tierra de las aztecas
Cielito Lindo, que Dios nos hizo
Son esas tres huastecas
Cielito Lindo, un paraiso .
    She laid the guitar beside her on the grass and said, ‘Do you think that’s really