Border Songs by Jim Lynch Read Free Book Online

autism, which meant he’d likely struggle with school, friendships and intimacy. Jeanette suggested the doctor was an idiot and demanded another. By second grade, it became alarmingly clear that Brandon couldn’t read, that he was guessing and thought everyone else was too. Norm remembered Jeanette writing a sentence:
The boy made a bird out of clay and put a fish in its bill
. When Brandon read it aloud it came out: “The boy made a bed out of clay and pet a frog in its bill.”
    Jeanette patiently tutored him on the sounds of letters and drilled him on the tricky in-between words—
was, saw, is, as
—he kept tripping over until she concluded that the harder he concentrated, the worse it got. Meanwhile, birds came easily, and Jeanette fed his fascination as if both their lives depended on it. He memorized
Birds of Puget Sound
before he turned ten. Your son has a gift, Jeanette told him, for birding by ear and for mimicking their voices. Terrific. It never struck Norm as anything to boast about. You should hear my son’s duck call! Next came his bird-rescue phase—he turned half the basement into a bird ER—and then his bird-art binge. He wouldn’t paint from photos, preferring instead to paint from
memory
—usually in-flight smudges of color and motion with a floating beak, an oddly detailed wing and a yellow eye in there somewhere. By his early teens he had a body that could jack a Honda onto two wheels, yet all he seemingly wanted to do with it was play with the cows, build strange forts and paint more birds.
    Strolling back to his sickly cows, Norm tried to comfort himself with the fact that the big boys would’ve long since slaughtered half his
burger cows
and put Pearl down a decade and nine calves ago. They demanded eighty pounds of milk per cow per day, whereas Norm asked his for forty or fifty. Pearl gave sixty, and never spent a day in thesick barn. She was so old and remarkable that Norm made an exception he regretted and let Brandon name her.
    Truth was, for the most part Brandon was great with cows, particularly at noticing things Norm and most dairymen missed—the beginnings of swollen joints, split hooves or eye infections, and the potentially agitating shifts in lighting, texture, colors or sounds. The problem was he crossed the lines. Always had his hands on them, especially when comforting mothers who’d just had their calves taken away. He even got down on the ground and let them lick his head and neck with their long, rough tongues—something Norm desperately hoped nobody else ever saw. Plus, how long could he watch his enormous son crouch beneath cows? Milkers should ideally be five feet, like Roony, not pushing seven.
    Norm heard voices ringing from Sophie’s house and pictured clinking crystal, bubbled drinks, cream-filled sweets and sensual odors. She entertained so often it was as if she were running for something. Norm increasingly felt like the only man in the valley who hadn’t gone for a
massage
. Her clients, based on the succession of cars behind her hedge, included Blaine’s deputy mayor, Lynden’s assistant city manager, First American’s veep, the head of the BP and many, many others.
    It amazed Norm how little he knew about her, even though they’d talked at least weekly since she inexplicably moved into the house she’d inherited from her aunt. A week later she’d placed an ad in the weeklies:
Give your body the gift it craves
. It felt like a brothel had moved in next door.
    But it was more than that. She read him like a relative who’d heard about him for years. Without warning, she asked if he was worried about running out of time. No explanation, just the question, as if his fears were stenciled across his forehead. Then more questions, as if what he said mattered, as if she were interviewing Moses.
    Norm heard dozens of rumors about her. She rocked preemies at the hospital, led aqua aerobics classes at the YWCA and ran current-events discussion groups at