Woodcock Night

Constance and Foster were a happy mismatch from the moment they met on the evening train twenty years ago. It’s surprising their paths even crossed. Constance was the librarian at a private school for girls, roundly compact, quickstepping and easily diverted, her dark eyes darting over everything in her path in a never-ending search for beauty and meaning. An early flower child, she wore layers of skirts to work, colorful scarves and gypsy jewelry, even after the dress code was thrown out in the seventies and the girls could dress like boys.    

           Foster had moved up to head accountant at a venerable old family firm run by the remaining members of the previous generation. He was pale in face and dress, tall and lean and dour. He walked with a steady gait and determined focus on his destination, his head leading his body, even downhill. Everyday, with his battered old briefcase, the newspaper, and his lunch in a bag, he took the train to work all week, all year in the same ledger until it was full, then filed it and ordered another from the supply room downstairs. Pragmatic and efficient. Predictable.

Constance, on the other hand, was a dreamy romantic. When the library was empty and she was re-shelving the stacks, she became Eustacia Vye tramping over Egdon heath or Catherine Earnshaw prowling the Yorkshire moor. She re-alphabetized biography while gathering bluebells by the abbey wall. Climbing the metal stairs to periodicals, she was a Russian princess ascending to the tower room and her destiny. For years Constance struggled in vain to intoxicate even one girl with the Brontes, with Hardy, Byron or Tolstoy. Not even Shelley and his women got their attention, not even when she spiced up their story, which hardly needed doing. 

She eventually stopped trying. She just read and reread her favorites at the desk,  roused if any student actually wanted to check out a book, usually a sordid novel she’d hated ordering, a teen escaping from gang violence or abusive parents. Date rape, drug addiction, alien captors.

 Then one day, quite spur of the moment after she dusted the complete Shakespeare that no one appreciated but her, Constance simply retired. She'd slipped too far behind the times. Before she left, she interviewed her replacement, a young woman who’d read everything modern and had already published a scholarly article entitled “Therapeutic Syllabi for Middle Schoolers.”

When she told Foster what she’d done, he uncharacteristically stepped right out of the family firm. Both were sixty, younger than they’d planned to be.

           The next year was one long weekend. Foster sprawled on the sofa in his flannel shirt reading the papers or played tennis at his club in whites. Constance browsed the antique stalls and book shops. She read in the public garden and rode the paddle boats. When weather permitted, they had dinner on the balcony of their brownstone and watched the sun flash down the skyscrapers across the park. They had few visitors. No one to notice their hair growing paler, their eyes getting smaller and their height falling softly away like feathers. One evening, partly out of boredom, partly on a whim, they decided. They would move to a nearby quiet island where they’d once daytripped. 

Foster grumbled as he backed their loaded car onto the ferry, the rear window completely blocked by cartons of Constance’s books. The crossing was stormy. Whitecaps filled the channel and seagulls flew sideways. It was stressful. Foster drank beer in a plastic cup, exasperated Constance hadn’t packed her coat where she could find it so they could walk the deck together. She was irritated with her herbal tea choice and with Foster, who kept humming the same part of the same old song, the fit of their differences shifting like a jigsaw puzzle on a tippy card table.

          They arrived on the island disgruntled and drove without speaking to their modest rental, chosen mostly for slivers of ocean seen through the trees. There were near misses while unpacking. A car door slammed too soon, an armful of brooms whacking around a corner. Luckily neither was hurt but after colliding too many times between closet and bureau, they set off in opposite directions. Foster disappeared downstairs to repair screens. Constance went upstairs to sweep the deck that overlooked the yard. 

Old snow clung to a shady corner. Empty bird feeders of all shapes and sizes hung from branches, lined the railings and stuck to the sliding glass doors. Constance had never in thirty years fed pigeons on the fire escape but she washed, rehung and filled every feeder from a sack of seed she found in a galvanized barrel. Almost at once birds began to flit in the trees, gathering for a rush as soon as the sun passed over the house. 

By the time she and Foster called it a day and stood with their cocktails inside  clean sliders, the feeders were covered with plump little sparrows, finches and chickadees and one woodpecker identified with the help of a bird book that came with the house. 

They pulled the matching recliners around to face the deck and passed one old pair of binoculars back and forth for days until the constant refocusing sent Foster fishing through the catalogs for his own pair. They watched the birds and the sky and the tidal lagoon in the distance. With no work stories to tell they didn’t talk much, just breathed the salt air and sighed long sighs. They were islanders now, with a post office box and a four digit phone number. 

Constance slid into island life as surely as she stepped to the front row of every class picture having always been the shortest. She loved being surrounded by water, far from the turmoil of mainland mortals. She let her fluffy gray hair grow long hoping one day to pin it up in heavy coils. Already she could gather a short tuft at the back of her head. She walked to the general store and the library. She biked all over the island with skirts flying. Bundled in sweaters, she leaned against boulders on deserted beaches and read for hours marked only by the sunshine moving down the dunes. No one ever interrupted or made too much noise.

But Foster rattled around like a stone in the watering can. At the firm, he had melted quietly into the rush of fast legs and snapping briefcases. Now he had nothing to do. He wore his flannel shirts everyday--the black and white plaid, the black and white check, and the gray one with faded gulls. His chinos still held a crisp press down the front of each long leg, even the heavy work pair with frayed pockets and those that now were shorts.

Every Thursday, they read the weekly paper together, every article, every notice, every ad. Constance liked to read the Bird News column aloud. Their island, they learned, was a natural habitat for many species as well as a popular rest stop for birds flying north or south each season. A birder’s paradise apparently, the rarest and earliest reported by phone then printed in the Bird News. 

“Some are ‘accidental birds,’” she read to Foster one night as they sat propped up in bed. “Blown in off the ocean. Like us.” She fretted about the beautiful sea birds separated from their flock, marooned on unknown islands.

Coworkers had predicted Foster would need a hobby. Birdwatching looked easy and soon he’d filled the yard with even more feeders in hopes of attracting new species. Each duck that paddled up the lagoon got listed in his new black notebook. He read everything about birds he could find, charted migration patterns and organized his life around sunrise and Thursday’s Bird News.

            Constance, on the other hand, began to hear bird calls on her walks. She’d stop to listen, try to see them in the trees. She felt heartbreaking passion in each song, saw dramatic intent in every flight. The great blue heron standing motionless in the shallows was a knight far from home on a quest for honor, maybe love. Foster said she was missing the point.

“Herons are always here,” he told her. “Their skinny necks and stick legs just make them hard to spot. Night-crowned herons are somewhat rarer, but neither will make the Bird News.” 

The only previous evidence of this competitive streak was his vicious forehand in the weekly tennis match against the firm’s lawyers. Now suddenly, more than beating Legal, more than anything he’d ever wanted, Foster longed to see his name in the Bird News.  

Constance quietly observed this behavior, afraid relatives happy to attach something concrete to his personality would bury Foster in bird stuff on Christmas and birthdays; paperweights, mugs, coffee table books, silly tee shirts.          

            To distract him, she chattered about the celebrities who frequented the island looking for rest and anonymity, dropped a tantalizing name to entice him out for a ride, disclosed the location of a certain someone’s unmarked dirt driveway. “Trespassing is a local winter sport,” she told him. “Cruise a private road and pretend to be lost if caught, drop a local name.”

Foster knew she’d been eavesdropping again, meandering the farmer’s market with her straw basket. He’d just adjust his binoculars, much more intrigued by the idea of being first to spot a rare bird. He wasn’t quite sure yet if what he was watching was what he thought he was watching, or if it had been seen everywhere already and wasn’t news at all. He hadn’t called the Bird News yet, although he knew the Bird Line number by heart, having stapled it to the deck railing and taped it on the phone.

One Thursday in June, Constance pedaled back up the path, a beat-up bag of early chard and a branch of lilacs in her basket.

“How’d the boat line look?” Foster yelled down from the deck. 

“Like a flock of pigeons on hot tar,” she called. He leaned over the railing and gave her two thumbs up, not too new to scorn tourists.

“Got the paper?”

She dangled it at him. “What will you give me for the Bird News?” 

Foster strode back into the house. He gave her a peck on the cheek as she arrived upstairs then dropped in his recliner, one hand out for the paper, the other untying his sneakers. 

“I saw Alice Shearwater at the farmer’s market,” she said and gave him the paper. “I told you about her, remember? She lives with a man who carves wooden birds. She paints them colors you’d never see on any Northern bird. You’ve seen her name in the Bird News, she birds on North Bay." He nodded, reading intently.

“And guess who else I saw,” she said. “I almost didn’t recognize her in Bermuda shorts since I’d only seen her at the Christmas party. Quite a switch from white wool slacks and red spike heels. Margaret Billings!” A scowl deepened the lines on Foster’s forehead. “They live here now too. You never liked him, did you? I wonder what he’s...” 

Foster heaved the paper in disgust. 

“Billings!” he snorted. “It is him! Mr. Blow-Hard Corporate Lawyer! Never made an honest line-call in his life and now he’s in the Bird News!” 

He rotated his recliner to turn his back on the screen door. He relit his pipe and blew smoke at the offending column. Constance watched a female cardinal light on the railing, heard her mate snipping from the cedar tree.

“What did Billings see?” she asked reluctantly.

“He says he saw an oystercatcher, as did three or four other people. A safe spotting this time of year and unnecessary call to the Bird Line. Unless you’re Billings. He probably heard it at the post office and ran home to call it in himself.” 

Constance gingerly picked up the paper. Along with the osprey back from their winter in the southern hemisphere, May brought yard sales and the weekly flea market. She loved prowling for her newest passion, Victorian bird cages. Last week she found a delicate black wire cage that held a gold canary, mouth frozen open in song and feet soldered to his little perch. The slightest breeze through the bedroom set the canary swinging and never failed to startle her. Constance wouldn’t dream of putting a real bird in one of her cages. She was more apt to picture a tiny version of herself wandering the sun-barred space.

Sometimes she bought other things at the flea market but only to avoid being identified by the dealers as the birdcage lady. When Foster asked why she took so long to look, she explained it wouldn’t be any fun if a dealer greeted her with cages in hand. She’d rather catch a glimpse of slim bars or a bit of scroll work, keep one eye on the spot while browsing other tables then approach nonchalantly. It was rarely a bird cage but if it was, she wasn’t very good at bargaining for something she wanted and the dealers knew her anyway.

As she read the listings to plan her itinerary for the next day, she thought about Alice Shearwater and the conversation she overhead.

  “Osprey mate for life,” Alice had said to the woman in overalls leaning on the side of her pickup.  

The crowd was thinning; it was nearly time to close down. “It hits you like a ton of bricks when you see them together,” she said as she wrapped her carved birds and fresh garlic in newspaper. Constance studied jars of jam in the next stall and listened. 

“Who’s to say we’re more evolved than the osprey? Osprey are the archetype of relationship.” Rapture lit her beautiful face. “Transcendent! To watch them soar and dive down the lagoon, all that beauty, grace and strength.”

“Perfect pas de deux to the song of the wind and the waves,” said the other woman.

“And either osprey could leave its mate for another,” Alice went on as she packed tubs of pesto into a milk crate. “But they never do. Equality. Pure attraction. They call back and forth as they dive to inspire each other. Sometimes they share their fish and sometimes they don’t. That’s my favorite part, the best part, don’t you think?” 

The other woman nodded. 

“They fly for the thrill of flying,” Alice sighed. “And live together in a nest so high and deep they’re invisible to the rest of the world.” She slammed the tailgate of her truck. 

Constance was about to move away when Alice said to her friend, “Speaking of mating, you going to Woodcock Night?”

“When is it?” the other woman asked.

“Tomorrow at dusk. The sanctuary at Scraggy Neck. But check the Bird News.” 

Constance left immediately to ride to the store for the paper. 

Scanning the Bird News, she asked Foster pointedly, “Did you read beyond Billings?” Ignoring his dismissive wave, she read aloud the description of Woodcock Night. Foster listened, took another pull on his pipe.

“Will we see that birdbrain Billings? Will he be there?” He stood up and shouted through the screen. “That rare redheaded birdbrain!” He turned to Constance and added, “Very rare, thank God. But if he’s going to see the annual woodcock mating dance, then so will I. Come one, come all!” he called after her into the kitchen  “...a primitive mating dance, the likes of which man has never seen! See a weird bird do things to another weird bird beyond your wildest fantasy!” He loved to shock Constance, who loved letting him think it was easier than it really was. After promising he would refrain from nasty speculation in front of the other woodcock watchers, Foster didn’t speak again the rest of the afternoon.

When they arrived at Woodcock Night the next evening, a group of local birders were waiting in the entry hut to walk together to the site. Constance recognized some from the market, or the hardware store, or perhaps the post office, she wasn’t sure.

“Almost everyone here is an islander,” she said to Foster under her breath. She plucked a wisp of grass from her round bosom and released it to the wind. 

The ranger arrived and taught the group how to watch for the well-camouflaged woodcock, how to crouch with binoculars focused before dusk brought out the male birds for their mating display. The sun was near the horizon as the group flocked to the meadow. 

Foster kept thinking how perfectly happy he would be spending the evening in his recliner watching his feeders from the bug-free side of the screen door, scanning the trees along the lagoon like a sailor on bow watch in iceberg waters. His Peterson’s Guide to Birds East of the Rockies, his notebook and pen, telephone close at hand. But instead here he was, creeping through a field, holding a card of woodcock spotting instructions with the rest of the Boy Scouts. The Bird Line number echoed in his head. He could kick himself.

Especially since Billings wasn’t here. As Foster followed the others down the grassy path he worried about being so far from his feeders and his phone. Conditions were unusual for June and something rare might stop on its way somewhere else. After all, seeing woodcock would be no surprise. Everyone here would see the bird they came to see, that was the point of Woodcock Night. An advertised sighting. While Billings, he was sure, was up on his widow’s walk, pacing from one top-of-the-line telescope trained south on the harbor to the other trained west on the marsh. 

But Foster did want to see the woodcock, or timberdoodle as it was apparently called locally, do his thing. And he didn’t want to disappoint Constance.

She nudged him to notice the tall woman with wild black hair who arrived late. “Alice Shearwater,” she whispered as the woman sailed past, “those outrageous birds, and garlic. Her own pesto and oil of lavender in amber bottles.” Foster watched Alice ease into a group of nodding people clustered around the ranger.

“I wonder if her painted birds are comments on possibility,” Constance said quietly, “or ecology.”

 Foster grunted. They stepped closer. The ranger, in hushed tones, was describing their prey’s song and dance. Constance whispered again.

“He doesn’t quite have the poetry of it, does he. I wish it was Herb.” Herb Wormwood was the editor and sole writer of the Bird News and a very poetic man.

But Woodcock Night was not entirely successful. Only one woodcock danced, and so quickly that Constance and Foster had barely a glimpse. The lovesick bird soared up singing urgently, then dropped in a spectacular spin head first into tall grass. The ranger assured them he’d landed safely and would reemerge to dance again. But he never did. 

“He’s not hurt,” said the ranger, eying the spot in the grass where the bird disappeared. “They dance more when it’s warm.” He led them back to the hut by flashlight and explained that it was cool for June, and at least the newcomers would know where and how to spot woodcock on a warmer evening.

As their car bumped along the dirt road toward home, Constance was breathless with exhilaration.

“It happened so fast but God, he was incredible, wasn’t he!” She shivered and rolled down her window to breathe the night air. “Couldn't you just picture the female woodcock perched on a log at the edge of the field watching him? Like a pretty girl leaning on her car while a daredevil pilot dips and rolls above for her. Why do you suppose he gave up after only one try?”

Foster rolled his eyes in the dark.

“You’ve been on an island too long, my dear. Probably he already got some today. We’ll go next year.” 

“Did you see the man in the brown canvas cap? Plaid shirt, glasses, about our age? With a boy eleven or twelve?”

“No,” said Foster, only able to picture Alice Shearwater. “I was watching for woodcock. What about him?”

“I think it was Senator Smithson,” she said. “He has a house here.”

“Why didn’t you point him out? You tell me who everyone else is, along with what's in their shopping cart.”

“I do not! Besides, I didn’t want anyone to see me notice him. That’s why they come here, to not be seen. And I wasn’t positive it was him. What we need is a code word for a celebrity sighting, a way to alert each other. We’re bound to spot people now that we’re here year round. If it was Senator Smithson, he blended in, all camouflaged in those ordinary clothes. Just grandfather taking grandson to his first Woodcock Night.” 

Foster smirked. “Ancient male initiation rite,” he said, “only they used to call it....” She turned a warm frown on him. “Never mind,” he said. “How about that code word?”

“You tell me, Foster. What’s a rare bird that blends in with his surroundings to avoid being spotted? Like a senator on vacation.”

“Treecreeper,” he said. Billings rushed unpleasantly into his head and he accelerated. 

Through the following weeks, Constance walked, biked and read. She counted the ladyslippers as they emerged on the path to the lagoon. She wondered if she could sketch them and maybe help Foster understand the joy of just seeing. One Thursday, she went to the tiny library and checked out a delicious DuMaurier and a poetry anthology. The sun was still high as she set the table on the deck for supper.

“Save the Bird News for a minute, Foster,” she said, handing him an icy rum and tonic. “I have a poem to read you.” He folded the paper open to the Bird News and set it beside his plate.

“’Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’” she read, “by Wallace Stevens.” She  glanced up to be sure he was listening. He smiled at her. 

“Among snowy mountains,” she recited,

“The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.” 

She paused dramatically before resuming.

“I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.” 

“Oh, for chrissakes!” Foster hissed. She looked up. He was reading the Bird News. 

“What’s the matter now?”

“I can’t believe even Billings would actually lie to the Bird News! Listen to this. ‘John Billings spotted a spruce grouse at his lawn feeder yesterday.’” Foster jabbed his finger at the newspaper. “Can you believe that? Two weeks in a row! What a pompous ass!”

Constance stood up to close the screen door. She gazed through the feeders at the silver threads of lagoon through the trees.

“Aren’t spruce grouse fading as a species?” she asked. “Nearly endangered?” With a wistful sigh she added, “As I remember, they only live in the deepest darkest northern woods, surviving by hiding in evergreen forests.” 

“That’s my point!” Foster dropped the paper and grabbed his pipe. “Billings says he saw one in the middle of his three acre chem-lawn overlooking the ocean! Really! Seeing one anywhere south of Maine would make the front page of the New York Times!”  He jammed more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, dropping bits on the deck. “Trouble is, no one knows that. They’ll believe him. This paper has a worldwide readership, you know. At least off island no one will see it for another week.”

Constance patted him on the shoulder and said, “Oh dear! An international hoodwinking of Bird News readers.” He didn’t smile so she took another tack. “Real birders on the island, and all over the world, Foster, won’t believe it. You’ll see.”

He waved his unlit pipe at the woods. “Oh, they’ll believe it! They want to believe it! Just like they believed Jagger was house-hunting on Longboat Point.”

“You didn’t even know who Jagger was,” she chided him.

“Nevertheless,” he said, “somebody only had to say they saw some pale skinny guy in black dancing down the beach at twilight and it was true.”

Constance kept trying. “Not a real treecreeper!” she said brightly. 

He snorted.

“Spruce grouse,” he said. “Herb must be on vacation.” After fussing with the rest of the paper for a while, he sat down to eat his dinner. Constance silently finished the poem.

A man and a woman are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.

For days, Foster couldn’t get Billings off his mind. Constance tried to ignore the circular path he trod between bedroom, bathroom and deck. His eyes were red-rimmed from his binoculars and he kept mumbling his exposé letter to the Bird News. 

“Foster,” she said finally, “you’ve got to get out! You’ll turn into an eccentric old man. Kids will dare each other to dash through our yard to get a glimpse of you.”

He agreed to an outing only if they drove to the conservation meadow above the south coast. Something might be resting there on its way north. During the drive she tried to help him let the grouse go.

“You don’t have proof he didn’t see it, Foster.”

“My knowledge is my proof!”

“Anyone who knows as much as you will know he lied.”

He groaned and dropped his head on his chest. Constance pulled over at the break in the fence that marked the path.

They carried their picnic into the meadow with its ancient crumbled farm and zigzagging stone walls. Constance spread an old blanket under a grove of crabapples. She decided to tell Foster about osprey. 

“Osprey mate for life, you know,” she said. “Like us.” He scanned the bright blue sky with his binoculars. 

“In for the long haul,” he agreed, squinting.

“It’s much more romantic than the long haul,” she said in her best hurt voice. “They have absolute freedom and choose to live only for each other. There’s one!” She pointed to a soaring speck over the ocean. “....and like a thunderbolt he falls!”  

“Eagles, Constance. You know Tennyson was talking about eagles. By the way, swans mate for life too. But they’re big and heavy and can’t out-fly each other,” he teased. “Stuck on the same pond with one mate forever and a bunch of ugly ducklings.” Constance laughed and pushed him onto his back. He laughed too and pointed his binoculars at her.

The deviled eggs, fresh air and warm sun were narcotic to Foster and he soon fell asleep, spread out long on the blanket with his sweater rolled beneath his head. Constance kicked off her espadrilles, wiggled her toes and crossed her legs under her skirts. She watched the ocean dreamily, until she felt her gaze pulled to a tall dead tree beyond the orchard. 

A huge white bird, spectacular and terrifying, was watching them from the top with unblinking eyes. Constance had never seen a snowy owl before, but there was no mistaking this one. She was sure he'd been watching them as long as they’d been in the meadow. She felt like prey. 

Growing uncomfortable under his aristocratic stare, she looked back at the sea. They’d stumbled onto his lands, she realized, travelers intruding. She glanced down at Foster breathing deeply, his mouth slightly open. He’d love to see the owl. Out of season, unpredicted. Breathtaking. She eased the binoculars out of his hand and slowly raised them to her eyes. A slight turn of focus and the owl loomed into view. His vivid yellow eyes under half-drawn lids. Frowning. Dusky flecks in his white chest feathers. Great curved talons gripping the top branch of the dead tree. 

She made herself as small as possible and set the binoculars on the blanket. She would show respect with silent admiration, gratitude and a quick departure. She slowly bowed her head to assure the owl she was aware of the sanctity of its domain. A spirit guide, a guardian of the temple. A pagan deity. Constance squinted. A gauzy kingdom floated in the space between field and the ocean. 

She should wake Foster, let him discover the owl. He would speed toward home and phone. She looked around in all directions. No one. Not a boat, not a cottage, not a car.  No one else will call. No one else could even imagine this bird, in this place, at this moment. The owl was still watching, but Constance wasn’t afraid and admired her from the corner of her eye.

“Treecreeper alert,” she whispered to Foster, who sighed in his sleep. She stretched out beside him and closed her eyes, just for a little while. Her beautiful owl would make a snack of a treecreeper. And would be gone before hordes of birders flocked to the meadow as soon as they read the news. She pictured next week's Bird News, even gave Foster a headline before she drifted into a dream where birds whispered in her ear and she alone could understand them.