Bird Watching

by Liz Stewart

Vincent van Zalinge

Love is growing inside me. I float in fields of honeyed grass. Me and a colony of grasses, a worm, a milkweed, a thistle, and a family of ants form a messy row on the ground.

Here is the place my mother watched for birds. She called it sanctuary. Her ashes were scattered here.

I am pregnant and my baby is love. My baby craves birdsong and makes me throw up the sound of Ninja blenders. It doesn’t matter how pure my wife’s intentions — she’s making homemade hummus, she’s pureeing squash soup, she’s pulsing oats for flour — baby grapples against that harsh buzz.

Baby feels safe at the farmhouse and rages against my bi-weekly drives to the city. Baby kicks against me all the way to therapy, and the therapist asks me, “How do you feel now about the loss of your mother?”

There are inexplicable children’s paintings on her wall.

I say, “I think she knew she would be revered in her dying. I think there was a part of her that liked the attention.”

The therapist nods and does not take that as an answer.

Baby likes bees, and it doesn’t matter that I am afraid of having welts on my body. Who am I to deny her rare and beautiful sounds?

Baby is quiet in the fields when I am in meditation, and it forces me to multitask, imagine two things: baby, and roots. A fetus is a belief, like any other. The way Baby takes me from sobbing to touching myself to wandering in circles to pressing my stomach against interesting sounds, it’s psychosomatic. I imagine Baby, a tiny knot of love. This is the only thing that makes me make sense.

A bird trills from a poplar on the edge of the long grass. My mother learned from her mother the names of all of the birds that nest here in the summer. It’s not something I know. I can spot a cardinal for its redness, but most birds are a shade or two of brown. I don’t know them like she did. I do not have her face, was always told I looked like my father and always took it as the insult it was intended — “You have his broad face, his eyes, his jaw” — and the birds don’t recognize me as a part of the family. They were cordial, almost affectionate, with my mother. Practically eating out of her hands.

Every night before we sleep my wife and I hold each other like we’re shipwrecked and talk about the future. What jobs we’re going to find once we settle into the farmhouse my mother grew up in and her father grew up in and his father grew up in. The prairies, where no one can hear you scream. We talk about what the baby will be like and what we’re going to call her. The conversation bleeds into my mother, who is now past.

Past is more complicated. There is something obvious about making money and giving a child a name, like building a road, a constant hauling forward. The way I remember my mother flies and swoops and dives deep into muddy water. A willowy, leather-skinned thing in a bright t-shirt, birds perched on her elbows and shoulders, brambles in her hair.

Mom restored the sanctuary around the time her own mother died and I moved to the city for university and started fucking women. The most important thing to her — I think — was planting the sorts of prairie grasses and wildflowers that existed in the paintings she found in my grandmother’s desk. Exhuming the rest.

It was a moral dilemma, the weeding. She wanted everything to be natural, but struggled to define the word.

She stopped believing in vaccines later in her later life. She turned into a lover of homeopathy. Garlic for arthritis. Mushrooms for cancer.

She grew bitter toward her brothers and her own husband for their use of industrial pesticides in agriculture. It was her number one issue with the industry, eclipsing the seasonal migrant workers, their line of unairconditioned trailers across from my uncle’s property, their bodies shining in the heat.

She had a loving connection to the soil.

I had a loving connection to her arthritic hands. She did look like a willow.

All of her shirts she bought on vacation. Bright blues and oranges and yellows, they said Hawai’i and Portugal and Banff. She was so proud of the trips she took with my father near the end of her life. It meant a lot to her, I think, to leave for the winter, and it especially meant a lot to her to come back and tell everyone on her curling team where she’d been. I think she was happy then. I don’t know.

A contractor comes to check the wiring in the house that is mine because no one else wanted it. My brother has a mortgage and a landscaping company in Calgary. My dad has been moved permanently into a home.

Baby rejects the noise of the man and his equipment and moves me into the sanctuary. The grass, autumn-old, twitches in the wind. In three months it will be the dead of winter, and I will have Baby on my lap. And a wife, a father, a brother, a set of in-laws, a haunted house. I want to collect loved ones like figurines and put them on the mantle in the living room where there used to be pictures of me.

I dig my fingers into the dirt and scoop it into my mouth. The taste is like a dark secret. There may be a creature moving in the tree line. It may be twigs snapping in the breeze.

“I’m worried my baby is a Luddite,” I tell the therapist, who clicks her pen.

“Why does that spark fear for you?” she asks, and I roll my eyes. It’s obvious.

“Because my mom was like that. It obviously didn’t work out for her. I have this feeling my kid’s going to get eaten by a hawk or something on the property. She’s going to be afraid of electricity. She’ll never learn how to use a phone.”

The therapist nods.

I look through my mom’s diary, against my better judgment. I take the findings to my wife and point to the crooked blue ink.

“‘Everything is coming to an end’. This was years before she got sick.”

My wife puts on her glasses and sits on the couch with the moleskin book. She flips back a few pages. Forward a few.

“It’s 2010,” she says, “after they sold the farm to your uncle. She’s talking about the seasons. I’m not sure if she means a real end. She’s sensing a change in the way we all live. She says we can’t go on like this. A global ‘we’, I suppose.”

She sets the book down and looks at me with tears in her eyes.

“I really admired her, you know,” she says.

I rub her back. I can tell she’s going stir crazy, installing bathroom tiles and miles away from anything she sees as an intellectual challenge. I am not the spirited conversationalist I was in my non-pregnant days.

My wife was a scientist at the university where we met. I was in my undergrad, five years younger than her and ten years stupider. On our first date she told me she was being sued by a lotion company for trying to publish proof of their use of hormone-disrupting chemicals.

She told me that, and I told her to feel my hands.

“See?” I said, “Dry as fuck. I’m way ahead of you.”

She lived in Vancouver her whole life before running around the country with me. She says she loves the winter for its insulating quiet, and that it reminds her of me. We are in love, I think. We share pain.

I visit my dad once a week in the city. The home is cramped and smells septic. I ask him if there is a difference between ending and changing.

“It’s hard to be a person,” he says. “Your mother always said she wanted to be a bird.”

I leave him with a Tupperware of tomato soup.

I didn’t come home in time to stretch out in the truth of my mom’s dying. I have that regret, not relaxing myself at the foot of sickness, not introducing what was left of her to the preliminary concept of my baby, who was, at that point, an appointment with a lucky jar of semen.

It was too weird, and I hadn’t wanted to jinx it. I was too angry at her, for killing herself.

“I respect death. More than money,” she told me on a lucid day before she went.

“More than doctors,” I said. Her sweaty bedroom. Tears and snot. It was too late for treatment then, even if she changed her mind. And she’d never worked a day in her life, and had my father, framing houses in minus forty winters, to thank for that.

“But I think I’m going to be okay,” she said, ignoring me. “Your father and I are going to Italy next year.”

She couldn’t walk. She couldn’t sit up.

She never worked, unless you count the sanctuary and her mind, that kept spinning and spinning and spinning, and her love. Her passionate relationship with living.

“Everything is coming to an end.” I tell it to my belly in the sanctuary. Baby is hungry again. Hungry for birds, hungry for birch, hungry for cold rocks.

I dig my fingers into dirt and make-believe I am touching her. Baby is hungry for ashes made of cancer. Hungry for clay. For blood.

I retract my hands and stand. On the way back to the house the sun is setting. Through the clearing, I can only make out a silhouette, a cardboard cutout of a family home.

The next visit to the city I see my therapist and my father in the same day. It exhausts me just to drive from place to place. I tell my father about the thistles going to seed in the sanctuary, and ask if I should weed them in the spring, if mom would have.

I tell my therapist nothing, really.

On the drive home the cropland looks like an endless black scalp with bleached and broken hair. I turn down the gravel road to the lane, marked with a tree on each side. The leaves have already fallen on the ground. Somehow I missed the falling. I learned that it’s good for the soil just to leave them there.

Inside, my wife is on the couch watching DIY plumbing videos on YouTube. I sit on her lap and stick my face between her shoulder and neck. I can smell her sweat and blood, and I lift up one of her hands and suck dirt from her fingers. She moans and a coyote howls outside. She places a wet hand gently on my growing belly, and something moves.

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Liz Stewart is a fiction writer from small-town Manitoba, Canada. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Writing at the University of Victoria, and now lives with her girlfriend in a car somewhere. She has been published in Plenitude Magazine, carte blanche, and Camas Magazine, and is upcoming in Best Canadian Stories 2025.