Chapter 3: Stories Told in Down

There wasn’t a force on Earth that could keep Jacinta indoors while the sun was shining. She walked alone through the woods, examined every growing flower, and learned the habits of the birds. The majority of her forays over the years were on her own, and she often felt like she had a secret world that only she could ever talk about. She did find a listening ear in the form of a retired married couple down the road; Garth and Darby. They were avid hikers, and they asked Jacinta’s parents if they could take the girl on ever-longer journeys into protected areas, swamps, state parks, and abandoned railbeds.

Darby taught Jacinta how to see the world as a photographer; looking for unique perspectives and capturing the story of what happened. She taught her to look at mushrooms from underneath, and to read the stories left by animal tracks. She got to the point, over the span of a few years, where she started challenging Jacinta on her knowledge. She also pronounced Jacinta’s name in a way she liked, languidly letting the syllables roll off her tongue, as if completely unhurried. Jacinta would find something, say a bit of down feathers from a bird, and Darby would ask her what the story was. “What do you think, Jacinta, what happened here?” she’d ask, smiling.

“I don’t know,” Jacinta would say, then, knowing she wasn’t trying hard enough, she’d start thinking about the question. “Well, birds don’t usually lose this many feathers, do they?” she’d finally ask.

“You’re absolutely right. They do not. So, first, what kind of bird do you think this is?”

Jacinta looked at the pile of feathers carefully. They were golden, and soft, and downy, in a small clump. She pulled a feather out. It was tiny, the size of her pinky fingernail. Gray in the parts that looked like fuzz, then slender and gold at the tips, as if painted with the paintbrush of a fairy. Gold like goldenrod in the fall, vivid, flashing, shifting color as the feathers grasped in her hand moved in and out of the dappled sunlight. “Well, these are tiny feathers, and there are a lot of them, and they’re yellow,” Jacinta recounted, going down her list. “There aren’t many birds with this much yellow. Oh no! It’s the boy goldfinch, isn’t it?” she asked finally, tears welling at the corners of her eyes. She wished Griffin were there so she could bury her face and cry into his furry neck, but he was too big and too uncontrollable to go on walks with Garth and Darby.  Goldfinches, especially boy goldfinches, with their beautiful wispy songs and bold black on sun features, were her favorites. She’d been watching a pair nest and raise their babies all summer in the lilac bush at her Aunt Mary’s. 

“You’re probably right, Jacinta, it probably was one of the boy goldfinches. But you know what? Nature makes lots of goldfinches, because sometimes one has to be used as food for other animals, and that’s ok. It’s the way things are supposed to be.”

“So something ate the goldfinch?” Jacinta might ask.

“Yes, I think so.” And Darby or Garth would go on to explain to her how a bird loses feathers if it’s attacked by something. If you only find a few feathers, it usually means the bird got away. If you found a lot, it means that something that was hungry got to eat. And Jacinta would take their clues, and search for more. “This one didn’t make it,” she said grimly, holding up a wing. “And it’s definitely a goldfinch.”

When she asked Garth how come he liked to be outside, Garth told her he’d been raised by wood elves. He told magical stories describing his childhood among the elves, and gave very vivid descriptions of the wood stump where he lived; the walnut husks they used as teacups; keeping black wood beetles as pets; and brushing his teeth with a dandelion. Jacinta would giggle, “You didn’t  really brush your teeth with a dandelion, did you?” and Darby would roll her eyes in her kindly lined face and say in tones fit for a conspiracy theorist, “Boys!”

“Garth’s not a boy!” Jacinta told her. “Oh yes he is, little one, oh yes he is,” Darby corrected her.

Garth was something called a botanist, she was told. That meant he was a person who studied plants. He had taught students about plants at a big place called the University of Pennsylvania. Over the course of several years, he taught Jacinta how to identify flowers and plants, and mushrooms, and he seemed to know a lot about other things, too. Jacinta was sure they knew about the whole world, and she wished fervently that she could go live with them. They had a big gray cat named Samson and an old Bassett hound named GORP, after the hiking food they always brought.

And thus, a scientist and artist was born within the outlines of a lonely little girl. Some of Jacinta’s fondest memories were of helping Garth and Darby write their book, about the plants that grew in reclaimed places.

“What’s a reclaimed place?”

“Somewhere that people once dug up and destroyed, and that nature took back years later,” Darby exclaimed.

“Why would people destroy nature?”

“Because people can be a greedy bunch of uninspired podgy old s***s,” was Garth’s explanation, “and don’t you dare tell your daddy I told you that word.”

“What word?”

“Podgy.”

“Ok. What about my mom?”

“Your mom might actually get a kick out of it.”

“When we get back, can I give GORP a biscuit?”

“Yes, of course you can,” said Darby, “and Garth, don’t get this girl in any more trouble with her folks than she’s already destined for, you hear me?”

“Ain’t a force in the world can keep this one out of trouble,” Garth would reply, “and I mean that in the best possible sense of the word.”

They took Jacinta to places like the abandoned strip mines outside of the city, and explained how men used big machines to move the mountain to look for coal. In the process, the entire mountain was destroyed, and everything that lived on or in it. Jacinta would stand on the mounds of earth, imagining a world where even mountains weren’t strong enough when men wanted what they wanted. “Where were the little girls?” she asked, “Didn’t they care?”

“They cared plenty, but had no choice. Destroying the mountain was how their daddies fed them.”

Jacinta wondered if Frank destroyed mountains when he worked, or if he destroyed other things. 

“My dad likes me best,” she told her friends one day, out of the blue. “He says I’m more fun to talk to than Mom.”

“I wonder about your daddy,” said Darby. I wonder a lot sometimes, she thought to herself, but did not say. Garth said nothing, but rather showed Jacinta a bright green beetle, like a painted Seven-Up can come to life, crawling through a chunk of quartz shards and glistening like it was radiating green bottle sunlight from its back. “Take a picture, Miss Darby, please take a picture for me!” Jacinta exclaimed.

Darby not only took the picture, she also made a copy of it and framed it in a little silver frame for Jacinta to always remember her fun in the strip mines. In the corner, in her neat handwriting, she wrote: ‘August 12, 1986: we found this little fellow walking through the Tomhicken Tract.”

These were good times, and Jacinta never forgot them, even later when Darby was gone from the world and Garth was gone from his mind. She also never outgrew her habit of looking for the story in whatever she was told. She considered this a gift; she found the world had other ideas about it.

 

 

 

Reviews

[Through the Gateway]

Another great chapter, Marie. We are truly beginning to see Jacinta take shape into the woman she'll one day be. The story still interests me, and that's a good thing!

One edit: "She did find a listening a listening ear in the form "...you wrote "a listening" twice.

Cheers.