In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees. Jeff Talarigo
direction with a tilt of its wing. Nothing escaped the eyes of the hawk, nor, once the creature was in its claws, could it ever wriggle free.
One day, while in its nest, a large net was cast over the hawk and it was taken away. It fought and clawed and tried ripping the net with its powerful beak, but it couldn’t break free. Soon the hawk found itself in a metal cage, the bars so close together that it could barely work its claws between them. The hawk couldn’t spread its wings inside the cage and as the days passed into weeks its wings became useless. Unable to open its wings, they became bent and slowly the beautiful brown feathers began to fall and drift through the bars of the cage and float to the floor. After weeks of captivity became seasons the hawk was scrawny, ridiculous looking with its bowed wings and without feathers.
Suddenly, on a late winter’s afternoon, the cage was opened and the hawk was free to go. The hawk took its time, looking all around for those who had captured him. The hawk waited and waited and when he saw no one, stepped cautiously to the edge of the cage, then took the final step and was in midair. Trying to spread its wings, the hawk couldn’t do it; they remained bowed and the hawk plummeted to the floor, falling hard.
Stunned, the hawk looked up and saw the bottom of the swaying cage. He wondered how he would be able to get back inside. Knowing that it couldn’t make it back to the cage by itself, the hawk began to screech, and even its screech had changed; it had lost all of its power for it had rarely done so in its captivity.
In time, one of the captors appeared and began mocking the hawk. He laughed and laughed before asking if he had had enough and would he like for him to help the hawk back into the cage. The hawk said yes, yes he would like help. The captor picked up the hawk and placed him into the cage. As he was about to shut the cage’s door, the captor decided against it, for he knew that the hawk could not go anywhere without his help.
The cage door remained open and the hawk remained inside. Many cycles of the moon passed before the useless wings of the hawk fell off and then it was some time before its claws too were shed and stronger legs began to form. The hawk didn’t know what was happening; for a long time he was frightened by this changing of himself.
Whenever the captors came to the cage, although it was rare that they did, the hawk cowered in the back corner, cowered under his fallen wings. When he was once again alone, the hawk marveled at his transformation. Legs nothing like a hawk’s, arms grown in place of his wings, even his beak had been blunted. The hawk waited for his captors to come back and on the day that they did he was huddled in the corner as usual, but as soon as they turned their backs on him he leapt out of the open cage, pounced on the both of them, crushing them with his all-powerful arms.
The hawk rushed out of the building where he had spent so many years of his life and he ran and ran until he came to the tree where he nested and from where he was taken by the captors. He called up to the nest, which was smaller than he remembered. None of the hawks responded and so he called again and it was a while before one of the hawks peeked out of the nest and looked down upon him.
“What is it you want?” the bird in the nest asked.
“Don’t you know me? It’s me, your brother.”
“My brother has been gone for years.” The hawk pulled its head back into the nest and couldn’t be seen.
“But it’s me. I may not look the same, but it is true. Ask me a question; a question that only your brother would know the answer to.”
The head of the hawk reappeared from the nest.
“What part of the rabbit do I like to eat first?”
“That’s easy. The rear legs. You always eat the rear legs first.”
Still doubting that it was his brother, the hawk asked a second question.
“What is my favorite kind of cloud?”
“That’s easy too. You don’t like clouds, for when hunting you can hide in them, but you always enjoyed the challenge of the hunt and never liked to hide in waiting.”
The hawk in the nest was shocked and filled with joy and although he didn’t recognize his brother he left the nest, landing softly on his brother’s strong arms. The brother embraced the hawk and made as if he were going to kiss him, but instead, took his brother’s neck in his hands and snapped it with a quick twist. He dropped his brother-hawk on the ground and walked back to the cage, which still had its door open, awaiting him.
Even here in Jabaliya, a place only rumored to have seen snow, the cold of Ohio stalks him.
The quarter-sized flakes batter the March landscape, the car being towed away during the late-night blizzard, the almost serene beauty of the snow pelting through the flashing yellow lights of the tow truck, growing smaller, dimmer until gone.
Snow continues to fall and twelve nights later the throttling ring of the phone and now it is his father who has been taken from him. A year before, nearly to the day, he cried while standing over the open casket of his father’s father, fingering rosary beads as the priest plowed through the prayers.
Now he stands above his father’s casket, minus the rosary beads, and thinks of the dwindling number of men in the family and of himself and how he made the two-hundred-mile trip in a borrowed car—his perfectly ironed shirts, done with care by a friend an hour after the phone call, flapping in the breeze of the rolled down window. And he walks up the fifteen steps, following the pall bearers into the church and then to the cemetery he goes across the still-frozen ground in shoes, like the car, not even his own, and he places a rose, red, and feels his lips against the second of April, cold-skinned casket.
That afternoon, following the funeral, he and his friends from Ohio walk past the house where he grew up, but was sold several years before. He looks over the stone wall into the backyard where he once played baseball and football alone for hours. Back then, he could never see over the wall, but now it seems so much lower and the yard so much smaller. His friend, who loaned him the car, comments on how he would love to go into the house and look around. They don’t. He can’t wait to get back in his borrowed car and drive west once again.
The quiet, more than the God, is what he seeks in the church. Each morning he goes to the earliest Mass. A gather of old men and women speckle the spacious pews. He is careful, when kneeling, to hide the bottoms of his shoes so that the woman, two pews back, doesn’t see the holes in them. He responds to the prompts of the priest, takes the Eucharist into his hollow stomach and returns to the pew, the same one every morning, and he wishes to lie down on the soft wood and pillow his head on the hymnals and sleep the mornings and days and nights and ache away.
When he is able to get a car, he goes into the city and begins to meet some of the homeless. One day in the city library he meets a homeless man from Alabama. They talk of the difficulties in going back home and asking for help. The two of them go that evening to a church basement and get a meal. He pretends that he, too, is homeless, but they all know he is not.
Through a patch of woods, five minutes from the house, there is a one room library. He goes there during the days to escape the chill of the house, the loneliness, the knocks on the door, the pestering of the phone. He has never read literature before, only magazines and a lot of newspapers. The librarian leaves him alone, as if she knows.
He