Little Bird of Heaven

Little Bird Of Heaven



The yearning in my heart! This was a long time ago.

“Can’t go inside with you, Krista. But I promise: I won’t drive away until you’re safe indoors.”

That November evening at dusk we were driving along the river--the Black River, in southern Herkimer County, New York--west and slightly south of the city of Sparta, in this long-ago time swathed in mist and smelling of a slightly metallic damp: the river, the rain.

There are those of us--daughters--forever daughters, at any age--for whom the smells--likely to be twin, twined--of tobacco smoke and alcohol are not unpleasant but highly attractive, seductive.

Driving along the river, bringing me home. This man who was my father Edward Diehl--who’d been “Eddy Diehl” and a name of some notoriety in Sparta, in those years--“Eddy Diehl” who would be my father until the night his body was to be riddled with eighteen bullets fired within ten seconds by an improvised firing squad of local law enforcement officers.

Daddy’s hoarse voice, always slightly teasing. And you love being teased if you’re a daughter, you know it is a sign of love.

“Just say we got held up, Puss. No need to elaborate.”

I laughed. Anything Daddy said, I was likely to laugh and say Sure.

Always you had to respond quickly to a remark of Daddy’s, even if it wasn’t a question. If you failed to respond Daddy would look sharply at you, not frowning but not smiling either. A nudge in the ribs--Eh?Right?

Of course Daddy was bringing me home just a little late, carelessly late. So that there was no mistaking that I’d been brought home and hadn’t taken the school bus.

Careless, that was Eddy Diehl’s way. It was never Eddy Diehl’s intention.

Daddy was bringing me home on that November evening not long before his death-by-firing-squad to a house from which he’d been banished by my mother and the circumstances of his banishment had been humiliating to him. This was a two-storey white clapboard house of no special distinction but it was precious to my father, or had been: a house Daddy had partly built, with his hands; a house whose roofing and painting he’d overseen; a house like others on the river road, paint beginning to peel on its northern, exposed side, shutters and trim in need of repair; a house from which several years before Edward Diehl had been banished by an injunction issued by the Herkimer County Criminal Court, Family Services Division. (Neither my brother nor I had seen this document though we knew that it existed, hidden away somewhere in our mother’s legal files.)

Our mother kept such documents from us out of a fear--it was an unreasonable fear, but typical of her--that one of us, presumably me, might take the injunction and tear it into pieces.

I wasn’t that kind of daughter. I think that I wasn’t. Clinging to a man’s careless promise Won’t drive away until you’re safely indoors, Puss.

From what dangers might I be safe, by this action of my father’s, Daddy did not say.

Copyright © 2009 by The Ontario Review. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.