The Pale Owl’s Cry

 

The baby stopped breathing while the doctors were still stitching up my incision and the nurses were counting sponges. He couldn’t have been more than four minutes old when something deep and electrical inside his primitive brain told his lungs to stop expanding.

And then, they got him breathing again. “The reptile brain,” the doctors called it. It’s a condition, for babies and adults. Apnea. Or if you’re really technical, Cheynes-Stokes breathing. Your body just stops. You’re unconscious, asleep, and far below the snail shell spirals of brain matter that constitute awareness and active living, there are synapses and neurons that decide to quit their jobs.

So, I quit my job before I left the hospital. Quitting was something I never imagined. I enjoyed the main office, and I really couldn’t see why a baby needed to be such a disruption. Not breathing was a real disruption, of course, and they gave us a monitor for him in his crib. It was a long, snaky thing; cables and connectors all hooked up to an IV pole with an alarm and an electronic screen. The first night I sat in the hallway watching it. The second night, I sat in the hallway watching it again, and it suddenly began to beep, loud, then louder and louder. I was already over the baby within the first two beeps. He was breathing fine; I could see his tiny, skinny chest heaving up and down. Still, the alarm sounded.

“Well, better that it gave you a false alarm than none at all, right?” the nurse said over the phone.

“That’s just my point. What if it also puts out a false negative?” I said in a tight, very tired voice.

“No, honey, that’s not gonna happen.”

Yeah. Probably not. Infant death probably isn’t gonna happen–they told us that in Lamaze. But even small probabilities become someone’s reality. That’s where statistics really fail the individual. When you’re desperate, though, you rely on statistics, and I knew if we could get him through the first four months, then Jimmy’s absent-minded breathing was no longer a real probability.

I carried the baby everywhere from then on. I wore one of those front-pack carriers to cook, vacuum, dust, get the mail, everything. At night, we took turns. James would sleep first, from 8:30 PM until 2:30 in the morning.  I sat and watched the baby, rocking in an antique, maple chair we had bought months earlier on a warm, hopeful Sunday. James would come in with his laptop at 2:30, and I’d wander down the hallway to a punctuated, frenetic sleep. James would leave at 7:30, and I’d walk for hours with Jimmy. The apnea had recurred already several times, but only while the baby slept in his crib. Each time, just grabbing him up out of the crib in my blind terror was enough to cause him to gasp and breathe again. Walking was like sitting in the hand of God, no worries. Every step reminded his brain: remember to breathe; remember to breathe. Every up and down bump kept his lungs from being lulled into ineptitude.

I discovered the owl when Jimmy was eight weeks old. I wouldn’t have heard it, but listening for the baby’s breath each night had awakened a preternatural hearing in both James and me. Listening to the baby breathe, I could hear dead leaves rustle far up in the poplars and fall to the ground on indiscernible air currents. I could hear the slightest shiftings and moanings in the battered farmhouse we lived in. I heard the wind, the birds, the tractor at the Hastings’ farm on their gravel road. Life had become a literal cacophony for me with its constant buzzing and whirring of life. So the owl, with its meager “Ooooo,Ooooo” followed by a faint snap, snap of its beak, made me look all around for its location.  I rested one hand on Jimmy’s head. He had gained a full pound in the last month, an improvement that made me feel lightheaded. As I stood listening for the owl, I swayed back and forth, rose up and down on my toes to keep him moving. I heard it again. “Ooooo…Oooooo.” Then a scrabbling noise. I was standing in the long road that approached the farmhouse.  There was an ancient, metal light pole there. It had lost its light long ago, and the pole had been painted a ghastly green at one time. The prior owner’s kids had hung a backboard and goal on it to play basketball. The net was no longer anywhere in sight, and the plywood backboard was peeling and splitting. The huge iron hooks they had hammered into the plywood were rusted; they clawed tenaciously at the hollow light pole’s top edge.

I couldn’t tell where it was. The noise was down low, close to the ground, but it sounded unmistakably like an owl. Fall had come swiftly and early, and the trees had no leaves. The owl was not on any branch nearby.  It was close to noon, and I had always thought owls were nocturnal.

I leaned down and smelled Jimmy’s head, warm and yeasty. It made me close my eyes. He slept almost eighty percent of the time, like most babies. He sighed a small, contented “hmmmm” and clenched his fingers in puny fists. Suddenly, all of nature, the birds, the wind, the shrubs, the creaking trees, all of it fell silent. I heard the “Ooooo, Ooooo” again, and Jimmy went “Hmmmm” again as if in response.

It had come from the light pole. I squatted down next to the pole and heard the scrabbling again, and then a light snap, snap noise. I stood up, taking two steps back. Then, I understood what had happened.

The owl had come to roost on the light pole. That peeling wood must have seemed like tree bark, and holes are what owls nest in. The owl must have thought it had found a hollow tree and dropped inside. The light pole was twelve feet high and some eighteen inches in diameter. The owl had dropped those twelve feet all the way to the bottom of the hollow pole. And then it couldn’t spread its wings to escape once it realized there were no holes in the trunk.

I waited for James on the front porch for awhile, humming and pacing, singing softly to Jimmy. But, it was getting cold and there was a frigid edge to the air that made me go inside to wait for James. When he pulled up, it was dark. I had him stand and listen to the bird. After a moment, there was the same “Oooooo” I had heard that afternoon.

“It’s probably a young owl.” He sat thoughtfully next to the light pole, then stood and glanced at me.

“It’s best, you know, to just let it go. It’s survival of the fittest, and if this owl can’t figure out the difference between a pole and a tree…he needs to die.”

Even in the dusk, his eyes were now averted. He blew warm breath into his palms, tightly cupped against his nose and mouth. “It’s not good for the rest of the owl population.”

We walked slowly back to the house.

There was an angry argument over dinner.

My voice, shrill and hysterical. Dinner plates, dropped into a deep sink.

“What about Jimmy, then? Should we let him die ’cause we need to breed apnea out of the population? At his expense?” Bone-deep fatigue, weeks of ragged sleep, nursing on demand—I sat holding my damaged infant, my boy who couldn’t remember to breathe. “At my expense?” My own breathing came in fits and starts, choking on itself.

James was tired, too.

“Listen, even if we did try to save it, how do we get it out? I can’t cut down that pole, and we can’t pull it out. It’ll just move away from any rope we put down there.” He paused and seemed to consider all the possibilities.

“More than that, I don’t want either of us on a twelve-foot ladder, leaving Jimmy alone. We’ve got our hands full.” He looked outside through the plate glass window of the dining room. In the last light of day, the sky had gone gray and sullen, thick like a flannel blanket.

“What if you or I fell off the ladder? What would we do? Who’d take care of Jimmy the way you and I do?” His voice was all business. “You’ve got to be reasonable. You have to focus on our baby.”

I sat next to Jimmy’s crib as usual that night, thinking of James’ tackle box. In it were fishing line, a catch-and-release hook, some half-pound sinkers. It would be simple to put a ladder next to the pole and fish the owl out. I didn’t even want to think about pulling the barbless hook out of its wing or neck or whatever I managed to hook.

I leaned far over the low crib rail. I smelled Jimmy’s baby skin, laid my cheek against his. He lay inside the sleeping wedge the hospital had given us, one that kept him on his side, the safest position. It would be quick. The owl had to be rescued tomorrow. Who knew how long he’d already been in there? I would put Jimmy in his car seat, bundled up, climb the ladder and hook the bird up and out. Jimmy would be in full view the whole time.

 

 

“Hey, hey. Wake up. I’ve got to leave a little early. It’s below 5 degrees. And snowing.”

I awoke to James’ warm, heavy hand on my shoulder. I stumbled from the bed and took Jimmy from him. The living room’s front window was filled with a sheet of drifting snowflakes. The ground was covered with the first snow of the season. James left while I was nursing Jimmy. I thought of the owl, how he would die of hunger, of thirst, perhaps of cold from being on the ground instead of high up in a roost. Jimmy couldn’t be outside in that kind of cold, snow falling on him. Getting the owl out would take a half-hour even if everything went smoothly.

I listened to James’ car engine, warming, idling in the driveway. I could barely hear it; the snow had created a blanket that muffled every one of the noises I had become so familiar with.

I looked down at Jimmy. He had fallen asleep nursing, and his body had relaxed into a deep, contented sleep. He gave a tiny “Hmmm” and flung his arm across my breast. I thought of his “Hmmm” from yesterday as if in response to the owl’s soft “Ooooo”.

I watched the snow falling, and I realized that I had stopped listening. For some time now, I had stopped listening. I didn’t hear when James finally stopped warming up the car and drove away. I had stopped that hard, fierce listening to all of the clatter in life, in nature. I had only been hearing, just hearing Jimmy’s breathing, my own, the creak of the house as the wind shifted outside.

“To hell with all of this,” I whispered to Jimmy. “To hell with snow, just to hell, to hell,” I was murmuring and moving.

I carried Jimmy carefully to his crib. I set his sweet-smelling body down inside the wedge. For a long time, I leaned over and felt his warmth, heard his soft, sighing breath. And then I turned and walked out, leaving the monitor unattached. I would never be able to hear it from outside.

In the garage, I found James’ tackle box. I lifted the heavy, sloping garage door. A curtain of snow blew lightly up in front of me, sparkling in brilliant colors in the early morning sun. I walked through the snow over to the pole. I dropped the box on the ground and returned for the ladder.

The ladder banged against the pole and slid on the icy ground. The cold metal rungs stung my fingers. It slammed loudly against the pole as I hoisted it into position. I reached for the tackle box.

I was so tired; I didn’t even listen for the owl now. I was tired of listening. Tired of waiting, hoping. The snow had come with its freezing silence, and the owl was either alive or dead in that soundless peace. I wasn’t listening anymore for beeps or breaths or leaves in the wind. I wasn’t listening even for my Jimmy, who, hooked or unhooked to the monitor, had also fallen into the world’s clatter and its beautiful hush.