Jackdaw Girl
Fern MacArthur stands on the back step. She stoops to strike a match on stone, cupping the flame as she straightens. The woodbine glows red with her indrawn breath. She shakes the match and tilts her chin back, sighing smoke. She stares up at the yellow hill.
There are jackdaws clattering around the chimneystack at the gable end of the house, where wood-smoke seeps and drifts up towards the hillside. Gorse sweeps its slopes, as if the evening sun has fallen and spread in shards upon the earth. Noisy creatures, jackdaws, Fern thinks. Inquisitive. Their incessant cackling questions. I am, are you? I am, are you? Her sister Netta had tamed one, once. When they were girls. When there were two of them.
In the slipstream of the years, with flittings and floorboard cracks, there’s only one photograph of them left in which they are both together. Edinburgh Zoo, the pair of them in double-breasted coats with small sharp collars. Both girls are holding birds. The bright blue parrot Fern remembers is a feathery blur hunched on her bent wrist. A white cockatoo sits on Netta’s shoulder, its head turned away. Fern’s socks sag; she smiles without showing her teeth. Netta laughs, or is trying to stifle laughter, slightly bent forward with her eyes tightly shut. The cockatoo’s head is turned to her dark hair above her right ear, as if whispering secrets.
When Netta was fifteen she told Fern she’d met a man on the hill. It was her job to go each evening and bring in the two cows for milking, and that was how it happened. He’d taught her to whistle through a straw and his mouth tasted of grass, she’d said. He wants a lock of my hair, she’d said, and Fern had said, don’t. Don’t. Give him a bit of Bessie’s tail, give him a hank of the yearling’s mane, but not a hair from your head. Promise. Attention from men is nothing to boast of, their mother had used to say, but she was gone by then. Netta had taken an envelope from the hallway bureau and inside she placed a jackdaw feather. It was midsummer, the evening she went up the hill, and did not come down.
Fern flicks the butt of her cigarette into the rhododendrons. Once there were two of us, she thinks, and now there is one. Soon, in the pull and fade of the years, there will be none. And no one need keep our secrets, then. Above her the jackdaws launch themselves from the roof and flap away down the glen. Two of them, today. Fern watches them until they dwindle to black specks, shrinking and dissolving against the grey sky. She knows they are still there, aloft on the air: rising, falling, calling to each other. I am, are you? I am, are you? They have simply flown too far, too high, for her to see.
L. A. MacRae has a PhD in Scottish Ballads and a fascination with story in all forms. She lives, works and writes in the Isle of Skye.