Osborn2

G l e n n  O s b o r n 

    A Hymn of Love and Remembrance

All day long the wind blew like the breath of Satan. The trees bent as if they were melting, all in one direction, curved over and creaking. The hot wind blew the shingles off the roof and howled through the rafters and there were no birds in the sky—only luminous yellow clouds with black bottoms that flew swiftly from horizon to horizon.

Inside, Melchior and his children huddled together like a pocketful of coins. They watched the shifting penumbra cast on the floor by the racing clouds and listened to the complaints of the screaming windows, which seemed always almost ready to burst in one shattering spray of deadly needles.

Melchior sang to the children in a warbling voice. Songs of biblical desperation, the only songs he knew. When his voice gave out he whispered verses from Leviticus and Revelation. The children pretended to listen, but their thoughts were on their mother, who had left before dawn in a yellow dress and a gray scarf, taking with her a rope basket which she carried beneath her iridescent green cape. I’ll find some food, she said, and slipped into the quickening wind.

Now it was nearly dark. She should have returned hours ago, but Melchior knew she would be unable to walk home in the wind. It would blow her to the ground and roll her away like an autumn leaf. He thought about where she might be hiding and hoped she was safely sheltered. She’ll get here eventually, he told the children. Mother will be back and we’ll all have something good to eat.

Outside the sky was turning to the color of rust. And then it was dark. The weary children fell off to sleep one by one until Melchior was the only one listening to the shrill whistle of the wind. And in the dark, the wind began to speak to him in guttural phrases. I’ll have your house...and your fruit trees...and I’ll have...your wife, he heard it say at midnight.

By three in the morning, Melchior himself was dreaming. Of convoluted mazes and strange, transparent creatures that endlessly worked their ways through the bruise-colored channels. And while he slept, the wind gave up. When he awoke at dawn and carefully removed himself from the clinging children, he could hear only silence. A silence like listening to the sea in a conch shell.

He tip-toed to the window facing the road, facing south, and could see to the right an amber glow above the still-startled trees that remained standing. Out in the brown lap of his yard, the vague shadows of broken limbs, the upturned roots of oaks and maples, stretching toward him like tentacles. But nothing moved and there was no sound.

Stepping to the door, he twisted the knob slowly and pulled it open as if his own safety and that of the children might escape, or as if sulphrous gasses might rush into the house if he moved with too much haste. But the door opened without incident and when it was fully open Melchior could see the rising sun beaming wanly through pink clouds. The clouds moved prayerfully, causing a single shaft of sunlight to pierce the morning and alight at his doorstep. And there on the glowing ground, as if in a sickly spotlight, lay a yellow bird with a gray head and dark green wings.

He knew immediately what it meant, who it was, what had happened. He bent to the ground and picked up the warm body of his wife and held it in his hand. Then he carried her to the table. While the children slumbered, he placed the beautiful bird on a pillow of the flowers she had gathered. He sat at the table as if before an altar and wept quietly. As the children awakened one by one they found their father singing a hymn of love and remembrance. They stood behind him and stared at the bird and then they, too, began to sing.

Their song filtered out the open door and into the rising sky and rose up into the brightening clouds to become the morning star, but soon it was barely visible, and then it couldn’t be seen at all.

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