Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But it was hard, now, to distinguish between my heart and the hawk at all. When she sat twenty yards across the pitch part of me sat there too, as if someone had taken my heart and moved it that little distance. It reminded me of Philip Pullman’s children’s fantasy series His Dark Materials , in which each person has a daemon , an animal that is a visible manifestation of their soul and accompanies them everywhere. When people are separated from their daemons they feel pain. This was a universe very close to mine. I felt incomplete unless the hawk was sitting on my hand: we were parts of each other. Grief and the hawk had conspired to this strangeness. I trusted she would fly to me as simply and completely as I trusted gravity would make things fall. And so entrenched was this sense that the hawk flying to me was part of the workings of the world that when things went wrong, the world went wrong with it. She’d left Christina’s fist with all the joy and certainty in the world. I watched her approach and waited with happy anticipation for the solid thwack of her landing on my glove. But it did not come. Instead, she snatched at the food in my fist with one down-dropped taloned foot, and kept flying, fast, out and away from me. I could feel the failure in her, the sense that she hadn’t got what she wanted, and I could feel, too, that what had just happened had spooked her, and that now she was flying away from it, and me, as fast as possible. I grabbed hold of the creance and ran with her, putting resistance on the line until she was brought to earth, crest raised, wings spread wide, feet planted in the turf, beak open, panting in fury. I held out my fist and she flew straight up onto it as if nothing had happened at all. ‘She must have been scared by something,’ I said. ‘Let’s try it again.’ And again the hawk came, low and fast, and again she snatched at the glove and kept flying. Again I brought her to earth. ‘Why is she doing it?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ This had never happened before. Over the years I’d had hawks that ignored me. Hawks that turned their back on me. Hawks that flew reluctantly, flew badly, or didn’t fly at all. It never worried me. These hawks weren’t at their flying weight, that was all, and this was easily fixed. But this was different. This was a hawk desperately eager to fly to me, but with a last-second terror of landing on my glove. It was incomprehensible. I telephoned Stuart. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. Does she need more manning? Is she too high in weight?’ I was as bewildered as a child. ‘What should I do?’

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Would it be all right, do you think?’ And on and on, a desperate, crazy barrage of incoherent appeals. I’m sure nothing I said persuaded him more than the look on my face as I said it. A tall, white-faced woman with wind-wrecked hair and exhausted eyes was pleading with him on a quayside, hands held out as if she were in a seaside production of Medea. Looking at me he must have sensed that my stuttered request wasn’t a simple one. That there was something behind it that was very important. There was a moment of total silence. ‘All right,’ he said. And then, because he didn’t see me believe him, ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure that’ll be OK.’ 6 The box of stars ‘Hiding to nothing!’ my old friend Martin Jones had said, and he’d raised both hands in the air in a gesture half of supplication, half exasperation. ‘It’s like banging your head against a wall. Don’t do it. It’ll drive you mad.’ I kept thinking of what he’d said as I drove. Clutch, into fourth gear. Roundabout. Change down. Fierce acceleration. Slight resentment. I didn’t want to think of all the things the men had told me. ‘It’ll drive you mad. Leave goshawks to the goshawk boys. Get something more sensible.’ I knew training this hawk would be hard. Goshawks are famously difficult to tame. To man, in falconry parlance. You can man a merlin in a few days. I once flew a Harris Hawk free after four. But gosses are nervous, highly-strung birds and it takes a long time to convince them you’re not the enemy. Nervousness, of course, isn’t quite the right word: it’s simply that they have jacked-up nervous systems in which nerve pathways from the eyes and ears to the motor neurons that control their muscles have only minor links with associated neurons in the brain. Goshawks are nervous because they live life ten times faster than we do, and they react to stimuli literally without thinking. ‘Of all Hawks,’ wrote seventeenth-century falconer Richard Blome, ‘she is doubtless the most Shie and Coy both towards the Men and Dogs, requiring more the Courtship of a Mistress than the Authority of a Master, being apt to remember any unkind and rough usage; but being gently handled, will become very tractable, and kind to her keeper.’ Well, kindness it would be, and kindness we shall hope for. Kindness and love. I remember thinking idly as I drove about that fierce burst of love I’d felt on the quayside for a man who held a bird terrified by a world it couldn’t comprehend.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘Not if you know the secret,’ he countered, leaning closer. There was a slight Jack Nicholson vibe to all this. I drew back, faintly alarmed. ‘It’s simple. If you want a well-behaved goshawk, you just have to do one thing. Give ’em the opportunity to kill things. Kill as much as possible. Murder sorts them out.’ And he grinned. ‘Right,’ I said. There was a pause, as if it wasn’t quite the right response. I tried again. ‘Thanks.’ And I was all, Bloody hell! I’m sticking with falcons, thank you very much. I’d never thought I’d train a goshawk. Ever. I’d never seen anything of myself reflected in their solitudinous, murderous eyes. Not for me, I’d thought, many times. Nothing like me. But the world had changed, and so had I. It was the end of July and I’d convinced myself that I was pretty much back to normal. But the world around me was growing very strange indeed. The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Things sat in it, dark and very still. Sometimes I felt I was living in a house at the bottom of the sea. There were imperceptible pressures. Tapping water-pipes. I’d hear myself breathing and jump at the sound. Something else was there, something standing next to me that I couldn’t touch or see, a thing a fraction of a millimetre from my skin, something vastly wrong, making infinite the distance between me and all the familiar objects in my house. I ignored it. I’m fine, I told myself. Fine. And I walked and worked and made tea and cleaned the house and cooked and ate and wrote. But at night, as rain pricked points of orange light against the windows, I dreamed of the hawk slipping through wet air to somewhere else. I wanted to follow it. I sat at my computer in my rain-lit study. I telephoned friends. I wrote emails. I found a hawk-breeder in Northern Ireland with one young goshawk left from that year’s brood. She was ten weeks old, half Czech, one-quarter Finnish, one-quarter German, and she was, for a goshawk, small. We arranged that I should drive to Scotland to pick her up. I thought that I would like to have a small goshawk. ‘Small’ was the only decision I made. I didn’t think for a second there was any choice in the matter of the hawk itself. The hawk had caught me. It was never the other way around.

• From Educated (2018)

  going.” I heard Dad’s step on the stairwell. Mother sighed and her eyes fluttered, as if she were coming out of a trance. Dad took his seat at the kitchen table and Mother stood to fix his breakfast. He began a lecture about liberal professors, and Mother mixed batter for pancakes, periodically murmuring in agreement. — WITHOUT SHAWN AS FOREMAN, Dad’s construction business dwindled. I’d quit my job at Randy’s to look after Shawn. Now I needed money, so when Dad went back to scrapping that winter, so did I. It was an icy morning, much like the first, when I returned to the junkyard. It had changed. There were still pillars of mangled cars but they no longer dominated the landscape. A few years before, Dad had been hired by Utah Power to dismantle hundreds of utility towers. He had been allowed to keep the angle iron, and it was now stacked—four hundred thousand pounds of it—in tangled mountains all over the yard. I woke up every morning at six to study—because it was easier to focus in the mornings, before I was worn out from scrapping. Although I was still fearful of God’s wrath, I reasoned with myself that my passing the ACT was so unlikely, it would take an act of God. And if God acted, then surely my going to school was His will. The ACT was composed of four sections: math, English, science and reading. My math skills were improving but they were not strong. While I could answer most of the questions on the practice exam, I was slow, needing double or triple the allotted time. I lacked even a basic knowledge of grammar, though I was learning, beginning with nouns and moving on to prepositions and gerunds. Science was a mystery, perhaps because the only science book I’d ever read had had detachable pages for coloring. Of the four sections, reading was the only one about which I felt confident. BYU was a competitive school. I’d need a high score—a twenty-seven at least, which meant the top fifteen percent of my cohort. I was sixteen, had never taken an exam, and had only recently undertaken anything like a systematic education; still I registered for the test. It felt like throwing

• From Educated (2018)

  “Do you have calendula?” the midwife said. “I also need lobelia and witch hazel.” She was sitting at the kitchen counter, watching Mother rummage through our birchwood cabinets. An electric scale sat on the counter between them, and occasionally Mother would use it to weigh dried leaves. It was spring. There was a morning chill despite the bright sunlight. “I made a fresh batch of calendula last week,” Mother said. “Tara, run and fetch it.” I retrieved the tincture, and my mother packed it in a plastic grocery bag with the dried herbs. “Anything else?” Mother laughed. The pitch was high, nervous. The midwife intimidated her, and when intimidated my mother took on a weightless quality, whisking about every time the midwife made one of her slow, solid movements. The midwife surveyed her list. “That will do.” She was a short, plump woman in her late forties, with eleven children and a russet-colored wart on her chin. She had the longest hair I’d ever seen, a cascade the color of field mice that fell to her knees when she took it out of its tight bun. Her features were heavy, her voice thick with

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here it was, and is, and all of it falling apart. Endings. Worlds dissolving. Weather systems, banking systems, the careful plans of municipal gardeners. Families, hearts, lives. Distant wars and small trees wrenched in two. I look at the line of people and all their fierce possessiveness and all their hidden terror at the thought that their bulwarks against death might be lost. Money. Security. Knots and lines. The ends of things. And it is sitting there with a cooling coffee that I think seriously for the first time about what I am doing. What I am going to do with the hawk. Kill things. Make death. I had hunted with hawks for years before death meant anything to me at all. Perhaps I was then to all intents a child. I’d never considered what I was doing was cruel. I was a spectator, not a killer. Wild hawks hunted; so did mine. There seemed no useful moral difference. And falconry for me was about revelling in the flight of the hawk, never in the death it brought. But when my hawk caught things I was pleased – partly for the hawk, and partly because I had, as a child, bought into that imagined world of tweed-clad Victorian falconers, where death was visceral and ever-present and hedged with ceremonial formalities. When I watched those men with goshawks put the dead pheasant in the bag all those years ago I saw a kind of ease that bespoke centuries of social privilege and sporting confidence. And the vocabulary I’d learned from the books distanced me from death. Trained hawks didn’t catch animals. They caught quarry. They caught game. What an extraordinary term. Game. I sat quietly watching the line and wondered. I would hunt with this hawk. Of course I would. Training a goshawk and not letting it hunt seemed to me like raising a child and not letting it play. But that was not why I needed her. To me she was bright, vital, secure in her place in the world. Every tiny part of her was boiling with life, as if from a distance you could see a plume of steam around her, coiling and ascending and making everything around her slightly blurred, so she stood out in fierce, corporeal detail. The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future.

• From Educated (2018)

  quick.” — MOTHER HAD LITTLE INFORMATION. Shawn had fallen. He’d landed on his head. Someone had called 911, and he’d been airlifted to a hospital in Pocatello. The doctors weren’t sure if he would live. That was all she knew. I wanted more, some statement of the odds, even if it was just so I could reason against them. I wanted her to say, “They think he’ll be fine” or even “They expect we’ll lose him.” Anything but what she was saying, which was, “They don’t know.” Mother said I should come to the hospital. I imagined Shawn on a white gurney, the life leaking out of him. I felt such a wave of loss that my knees nearly buckled, but in the next moment I felt something else. Relief. There was a storm coming, set to lay three feet of snow over Sardine Canyon, which guarded the entrance to our valley. Mother’s car, which I had driven to Debbie’s, had bald tires. I told Mother I couldn’t get through. — THE STORY OF HOW Shawn fell would come to me in bits and pieces, thin lines of narrative from Luke and Benjamin, who were there. It was a frigid afternoon and the wind was fierce, whipping the fine dust up in soft clouds. Shawn was standing on a wooden pallet, twenty feet in the air. Twelve feet below him was a half-finished concrete wall, with rebar jutting outward like blunt skewers. I don’t know what Shawn was doing on the pallet, but he was probably fitting posts or welding, because that was the kind of work he did. Dad was driving the forklift. I’ve heard conflicting accounts of why Shawn fell. * Someone said Dad moved the boom unexpectedly and Shawn pitched over the edge. But the general consensus is that Shawn was standing near the brink, and for no reason at all stepped backward and lost his footing. He plunged twelve feet, his body revolving slowly in the air, so that when he struck the

• From Educated (2018)

  driveway—a Kia Sephia Dad had bought from Tony a few weeks before. The keys were in the ignition. I loaded my stuff into it and drove it to Utah, figuring the car would just about make up for the money Dad owed me. I guess he figured that, too, because he never said a word about it. I moved into an apartment half a mile from the university. I had new roommates. Robin was tall and athletic, and the first time I saw her she was wearing running shorts that were much too short, but I didn’t gape at her. When I met Jenni she was drinking a Diet Coke. I didn’t stare at that, either, because I’d seen Charles drink dozens of them. Robin was the oldest, and for some reason she was sympathetic to me. Somehow she understood that my missteps came from ignorance, not intention, and she corrected me gently but frankly. She told me exactly what I would need to do, or not do, to get along with the other girls in the apartment. No keeping rotten food in the cupboards or leaving rancid dishes in the sink. Robin explained this at an apartment meeting. When she’d finished another roommate, Megan, cleared her throat. “I’d like to remind everyone to wash their hands after they use the bathroom,” she said. “And not just with water, but with soap.” Robin rolled her eyes. “I’m sure everyone here washes their hands.” That night, after I left the bathroom, I stopped at the sink in the hall and washed my hands. With soap. The next day was the first day of class. Charles had designed my course schedule. He’d signed me up for two music classes and a course on religion, all of which he said would be easy for me. Then he’d enrolled me in two more challenging courses—college algebra, which terrified me, and biology, which didn’t but only because I didn’t know what it was. Algebra threatened to put an end to my scholarship. The professor spent every lecture muttering inaudibly as he paced in front of the chalkboard. I wasn’t the only one who was lost, but I was more lost than anyone else. Charles tried to help, but he was starting his senior year of high school and had his own schoolwork. In October I took the midterm and failed it. I stopped sleeping. I stayed up late, twisting my hair into knots as I tried to wrest meaning from the textbook, then lying in bed and brooding over my notes. I developed stomach ulcers. Once, Jenni found me curled

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It’s my first day out with Mabel for a week. I’ve been interviewing students for my old college. For four days I’ve sat in front of frightened faces, asking them searching questions while trying to put them at ease. It was hard work. It felt like those first days with Mabel all over again. Now the interviews are over, and today I’ve been seduced by the weather. It is such a beautiful, fiery day, burning with ice and fine prospects, that I cannot imagine not being on the hill. I know my hawk is too high. I also know that after four days of enforced rest, she will be wanting to hunt very much indeed. What’s more, I’ve run out of chicks; Mabel has been eating nothing but quail for a week, and it’s made her a hot-tempered, choleric, Hotspur-on-coke, revenge-tragedy-protagonist goshawk. She is full of giddy nowhere-to-go desire. She foots her perch. She gets cross. She jumps in the bath and out again, and then in again. She glares. ‘Feed bloody food but three times a week,’ say the old books. Too much rich food and this is what happens. Already I can see the mood she’s in, and I suspect if I let her go here, she’ll fly straight to the nearest tree and ignore me. So I take her to the top field. There are no trees up there. If she leaves the fist there’ll be no close perch to fly to – she’ll swing about in mid-air and come back to me. And she does, for a while, but then she starts eyeing the far hedge. I can’t see beyond it. Mabel knows there are pheasants in there; woodpigeons, too, and rabbit-holes along the ditch. She starts that curious autocue parallax-bobbing of her head and makes as if to go. And I let her go. It is stupid of me, but I do. She flips her wings, glides away and disappears behind the hedge. I am strangely calm. I don’t even run. I amble in a leisurely manner towards it then realise, heart thumping, that I have no idea where she is. The hedge before me is an eight-foot wall of blackthorn needles. It’s impassable. I run up and down looking for passage. There. A gap the size of a porthole between two sturdy branches. I squirm through it, pretending I’m an eel. I’m not. There’s blood on my hands from the thorns on the ground, and the shoulder-strap of my hawking waistcoat hooks around a stubby branch. I’m caught. I try with all my might to keep going. There’s no time to turn and see where it’s snagged. Just brute force to try to release me. The branch snaps, and I ping forwards through the gap to land on my knees and the heels of my hands deep in a wet field of sprouting wheat. Mabel is nowhere to be seen.

• From Educated (2018)

  above her collarbone. An embroidered veil covers her head. My father wears a cream suit with wide black lapels. They are both intoxicated with happiness, Mother with a relaxed smile, Dad with a grin so large it pokes out from under the corners of his mustache. It is difficult for me to believe that the untroubled young man in that photograph is my father. Fearful and anxious, he comes into focus for me as a weary middle-aged man stockpiling food and ammunition. I don’t know when the man in that photograph became the man I know as my father. Perhaps there was no single moment. Dad married when he was twenty-one, had his first son, my brother Tony, at twenty-two. When he was twenty-four, Dad asked Mother if they could hire an herbalist to midwife my brother Shawn. She agreed. Was that the first hint, or was it just Gene being Gene, eccentric and unconventional, trying to shock his disapproving in-laws? After all, when Tyler was born twenty months later, the birth took place in a hospital. When Dad was twenty-seven, Luke was born, at home, delivered by a midwife. Dad decided not to file for a birth certificate, a decision he repeated with Audrey, Richard and me. A few years later, around the time he turned thirty, Dad pulled my brothers out of school. I don’t remember it, because it was before I was born, but I wonder if perhaps that was a turning point. In the four years that followed, Dad got rid of the telephone and chose not to renew his license to drive. He stopped registering and insuring the family car. Then he began to hoard food. This last part sounds like my father, but it is not the father my older brothers remember. Dad had just turned forty when the Feds laid siege to the Weavers, an event that confirmed his worst fears. After that he was at war, even if the war was only in his head. Perhaps that is why Tony looks at that photo and sees his father, and I see a stranger. Fourteen years after the incident with the Weavers, I would sit in a university classroom and listen to a professor of psychology describe something called bipolar disorder. Until that moment I had never heard of mental illness. I knew people could go crazy—they’d wear dead cats on their heads or fall in love with a turnip—but the notion that a person could be functional, lucid, persuasive, and something could still be wrong, had never occurred to me. The professor recited facts in a dull, earthy voice: the average age of

• From Educated (2018)

  The mountain thawed and the Princess appeared on its face, her head brushing the sky. It was Sunday, a month after the accident, and everyone had gathered in the living room. Dad had begun to expound a scripture when Tyler cleared his throat and said he was leaving. “I’m g-g-going to c-college,” he said, his face rigid. A vein in his neck bulged as he forced the words out, appearing and disappearing every few seconds, a great, struggling snake. Everyone looked at Dad. His expression was folded, impassive. The silence was worse than shouting. Tyler would be the third of my brothers to leave home. My oldest brother, Tony, drove rigs, hauling gravel or scrap, trying to scrape together enough money to marry the girl down the road. Shawn, the next oldest, had quarreled with Dad a few months before and taken off. I hadn’t seen him since, though Mother got a hurried call every few weeks telling her he was fine, that he was welding or driving rigs. If Tyler left too, Dad wouldn’t have a crew, and without a crew he couldn’t build barns or hay sheds. He would have to fall back on scrapping. “What’s college?” I said. “College is extra school for people too dumb to learn the first time

• From Educated (2018)

  I couldn’t bear to hear any other opinion on the subject. In those moments I searched feverishly for a reason to think myself sane. Evidence. I craved it like air. I wrote to Erin—the woman Shawn had dated before and after Sadie, who I hadn’t seen since I was sixteen. I told her what I remembered and asked her, bluntly, if I was deranged. She replied immediately that I was not. To help me trust myself, she shared her memories—of Shawn screaming at her that she was a whore. My mind snagged on that word. I had not told her that that was my word. Erin told me another story. Once, when she had talked back to Shawn— just a little, she said, as if her manners were on trial—he’d ripped her from her house and slammed her head against a brick wall so hard she’d thought he was going to kill her. His hands locked around her throat. I was lucky, she wrote. I had screamed before he began choking me, and my grandpa heard it and stopped him in time. But I know what I saw in his eyes. Her letter was like a handrail fixed to reality, one I could reach out and grasp when my mind began to spin. That is, until it occurred to me that she might be as crazy as I was. She was damaged, obviously, I told myself. How could I trust her account after what she’d been through? I could not give this woman credence because I, of all people, knew how crippling her psychological injuries were. So I continued searching for testimony from some other source. Four years later, by pure chance, I would get it. While traveling in Utah for research, I would meet a young man who would bristle at my last name. “Westover,” he would say, his face darkening. “Any relation to Shawn?” “My brother.” “Well, the last time I saw your brother,” he would say, emphasizing this last word as if he were spitting on it, “he had both hands wrapped around my cousin’s neck, and he was smashing her head into a brick wall. He would have killed her, if it weren’t for my grandfather.” And there it was. A witness. An impartial account. But by the time I heard it, I no longer needed to hear it. The fever of self-doubt had broken long ago. That’s not to say I trusted my memory absolutely, but I trusted it as much as I trusted anybody else’s, and more than some people’s. But that was years away.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Then I tell him I have no job any more and no money coming in. And no house either. It doesn’t sound convincing. So I tell him more. And more. Now it’s hard to stop talking. But when I do, he says some words. I can’t hear them clearly. I am watching his eyebrows. Sometimes they are frowning, sometimes very high. He hands me a multiple-choice questionnaire. This strikes me as grimly funny. I sit in front of it for a very long while, fiddling with the pen, worrying that I’m not getting the answers right. When it is finished it is hard to give it back: I’m convinced I’ve done it wrong. I don’t cry. I hand him the piece of paper and he takes it, turns it over and regards it for a while. He puts it down. He moves a pen from one side of the sheet to the other. He leans across the table. I see his face. I turn away. It is too unbearably kind. ‘Helen, we can help you,’ he says, in a low voice. ‘We really can.’ There’s a kind of tingling astonishment when I hear his words. It’s something like hope. I start to sob. I sob right through twenty minutes of delicate discussion, and agree to try a course of antidepressants. He is a good doctor. He tells me all about SSRIs, talks me through their side-effects, their history, their mode of operation. He draws little diagrams of neurons, adds dots and wavy lines for serotonin molecules and the action of re-uptake inhibitors. I peer at the pictures, fascinated. An hour later I’m walking down the street with a white paper bag in my hand. It weighs almost nothing. He says it will make things better. Which is ridiculous. How can this grey and mortified world be washed away by little dots and lines? Then I start to worry that the drugs will make me ill. Even more absurdly, I panic that they’ll stop me thinking clearly. That they’ll stop me flying Mabel. That whoever I’ll become under their chemical influence will be so strange and alien she won’t fly to me any more. The worries are a tedious avalanche but I put them to one side for long enough to swallow the drugs with water. There is an almost immediate effect: a tiredness so vast I can hardly walk, and my skull is empty, tight and painful. I don’t sleep that night. I lie in bed. The next morning I drink coffee. I drink more coffee. I keep on flying the hawk.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Forty-five minutes north-east of Cambridge is a landscape I’ve come to love very much indeed. It’s where wet fen gives way to parched sand. It’s a land of twisted pine trees, burned-out cars, shotgun-peppered road signs and US Air Force bases. There are ghosts here: houses crumble inside numbered blocks of pine forestry. There are spaces built for air-delivered nukes inside grassy tumuli behind twelve-foot fences, tattoo parlours and US Air Force golf courses. In spring it’s a riot of noise: constant plane traffic, gas-guns over pea fields, woodlarks and jet engines. It’s called the Brecklands – the broken lands – and it’s where I ended up that morning, seven years ago, in early spring, on a trip I hadn’t planned at all. At five in the morning I’d been staring at a square of streetlight on the ceiling, listening to a couple of late party-leavers chatting on the pavement outside. I felt odd: overtired, overwrought, unpleasantly like my brain had been removed and my skull stuffed with something like microwaved aluminium foil, dinted, charred and shorting with sparks. Nnngh. Must get out, I thought, throwing back the covers. Out! I pulled on jeans, boots and a jumper, scalded my mouth with burned coffee, and it was only when my frozen, ancient Volkswagen and I were halfway down the A14 that I worked out where I was going, and why. Out there, beyond the foggy windscreen and white lines, was the forest. The broken forest. That’s where I was headed. To see goshawks.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She’s not in condition, I tell myself all the way there in the car. You’ll lose her. It is two days later, and I can hear the voice of reason telling me to go back home. I keep driving. Rain spots the windscreen and spines the nearside windows. Will the rabbits be lying out, in this weather? Maybe. I park on the muddy verge against the wet fence at the far side of the field. She’s not in yarak, but she’s looking about. Whatever, I think; I change her jesses and let her go. She chases a rabbit to its hole and swings up into an oak tree. I whistle. She doesn’t seem to hear me. The rain starts falling in earnest. At this point, I realise something has changed about the space between the goshawk and me. Usually it’s taut with attention. When she flies into a tree all my attention is turned to the hawk, and the hawk turns all her attention to me. Not any more. She ignores me. There is something religious about the activity of looking up at a hawk in a tall tree. Sir Thomas Sherley wrote in the seventeenth century that flying falcons turns one’s eyes to the heavens, which is why falconry is a moral activity. This seems more akin to falling to my knees begging redemption from an indifferent deity. Mabel flies on, deeper into the trees. I follow her. She’s still ignoring me. Look at me, hawk, I’m willing up at the treetops – and she doesn’t. I find myself on someone’s lawn; I’ve trailed dark footfalls across the blue grass. The hawk is thirty feet above me and I’m shouting and whistling like a madwoman. Rain blows everywhere. I caper about. I chuck chick corpses high in the air. They fall with a thump to the grass and she doesn’t even turn her head to track their sad parabolae. I whistle some more. Wave my arms. ‘Mabel!’ I shout. ‘Come on!’ A sash window grates – an upstairs window of the huge Georgian house I’ve been pretending isn’t there. A maid leans out. Black dress, white pinafore, white hat. Nothing about this strikes me as strange. I have followed my hawk and walked backwards in time. It’s 1923. Any minute now Poirot will wander towards me across the lawn. Only later do I realise I had probably interrupted some erotic afternoon adventure. ‘Are you all right?’ she calls. ‘I’m really sorry!’ I shout back. ‘I’ve lost my hawk.’ I point vaguely up at the tree. ‘I’m trying to get her back. I’m so sorry to trespass on your lawn; I’ll be gone soon. Just desperate to get her back.’ ‘Oh?’

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He’d called me. Told me he was running late because of a crash, but that was all. ‘I’m going up the hill now,’ he said. ‘Coming?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘See you in twenty minutes.’ But the accident had been so appalling it had closed not only the main road but the roads around it too. All the rush-hour traffic crossing Cambridgeshire had to come through the centre of the city. Forty minutes later we’re no more than a quarter of a mile from the house and I am shaking with monstrous frustration. Poor Christina sits silently in the back. Mabel bates. I cannot bear it. She bates again. I shout at her. She does not know the noise is directed at her, but I hate myself for shouting, and that guilt sits on top of the other guilts and all those sit on top of the knowledge that the accident that caused this must have been terrible indeed. The air in the car turns solid as glass. I take deep breaths and stare out of the window. It is a beautiful evening. This makes things worse. I watch starlings coast over the shopping centre, watch the sun, sinking, sinking, and the smooth air furring at its edges into the shade of a woodpigeon’s breast, all delicate greys and torpid pinks. I turn on the traffic news. Turn it off. Mabel bates again, disturbed by the unaccustomed stops and starts and engine silence. Every bate ratchets up my stress another notch. I call Stuart on my phone. He’s waiting for us. I fume. The car inches. I look down and notice I’m nearly out of petrol, which adds a whole, delightful other dimension to the ticking minutes. By the time we get to the hill I’m practically catatonic. There, at the top of the hill , is Stuart’s Land Rover . We walk up the track. It’s getting dark. Mabel looks ragingly keen to fly for the three minutes it takes to walk up there, and I start to relax. But she takes one look at the nylon kite that Stuart has been using to help train his falcon to climb high into the sky – takes one look at this triangular splash of fluttering primary colours, looks me in the face, and then bates. Bate. Bate. Bate . Stuart persuades me not to go home. ‘We’ll find something for her to fly at,’ he says. ‘She’ll settle down.’ She does, a bit. So do I. I try to unkink my knotted shoulders and take deep gulps of cooling air. I am stressed. I don’t normally fly hawks free like this. Normally I’d call her to the fist on the creance as usual, then untie the creance and fly her once or twice without it. Only later would I try flying her at quarry. But I defer to Stuart’s knowledge: he knows about goshawks and he’s done this many times before. Time passes.

• From Educated (2018)

  beyond me,” she shouted, slamming the door on her way out. Mother retrieved her overnight bag and the tackle box she’d filled with dark bottles of tincture, then she walked slowly out the door. I was anxious and slept badly, but when Mother came home the next morning, hair deranged and dark circles under her eyes, her lips were parted in a wide smile. “It was a girl,” she said. Then she went to bed and slept all day. Months passed in this way, Mother leaving the house at all hours and coming home, trembling, relieved to her core that it was over. By the time the leaves started to fall she’d helped with a dozen births. By the end of winter, several dozen. In the spring she told my father she’d had enough, that she could deliver a baby if she had to, if it was the End of the World. Now she could stop. Dad’s face sank when she said this. He reminded her that this was God’s will, that it would bless our family. “You need to be a midwife,” he said. “You need to deliver a baby on your own.” Mother shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. “Besides, who would hire me when they could hire Judy?” She’d jinxed herself, thrown her gauntlet before God. Soon after, Maria told me her father had a new job in Wyoming. “Mom says your mother should take over,” Maria said. A thrilling image took shape in my imagination, of me in Maria’s role, the midwife’s daughter, confident, knowledgeable. But when I turned to look at my mother standing next to me, the image turned to vapor. Midwifery was not illegal in the state of Idaho, but it had not yet been sanctioned. If a delivery went wrong, a midwife might face charges for practicing medicine without a license; if things went very wrong, she could face criminal charges for manslaughter, even prison time. Few women would take such a risk, so midwives were scarce: on the day Judy left for Wyoming, Mother became the only midwife for a hundred miles. Women with swollen bellies began coming to the house and begging Mother to deliver their babies. Mother crumpled at the thought. One woman sat on the edge of our faded yellow sofa, her eyes cast downward, as she explained that her husband was out of work and they didn’t have money for a hospital. Mother sat quietly, eyes focused, lips tight, her whole expression momentarily solid. Then the expression dissolved and

• From Educated (2018)

  On one such morning, as I sat at the counter watching Grandma pour a bowl of cornflakes, she said, “How would you like to go to school?” “I wouldn’t like it,” I said. “How do you know,” she barked. “You ain’t never tried it.” She poured the milk and handed me the bowl, then she perched at the bar, directly across from me, and watched as I shoveled spoonfuls into my mouth. “We’re leaving tomorrow for Arizona,” she told me, but I already knew. She and Grandpa always went to Arizona when the weather began to turn. Grandpa said he was too old for Idaho winters; the cold put an ache in his bones. “Get yourself up real early,” Grandma said, “around five, and we’ll take you with us. Put you in school.” I shifted on my stool. I tried to imagine school but couldn’t. Instead I pictured Sunday school, which I attended each week and which I hated. A boy named Aaron had told all the girls that I couldn’t read because I didn’t go to school, and now none of them would talk to me. “Dad said I can go?” I said. “No,” Grandma said. “But we’ll be long gone by the time he realizes you’re missing.” She set my bowl in the sink and gazed out the window. Grandma was a force of nature—impatient, aggressive, self-possessed. To look at her was to take a step back. She dyed her hair black and this intensified her already severe features, especially her eyebrows, which she smeared on each morning in thick, inky arches. She drew them too large and this made her face seem stretched. They were also drawn too high and draped the rest of her features into an expression of boredom, almost sarcasm. “You should be in school,” she said. “Won’t Dad just make you bring me back?” I said. “Your dad can’t make me do a damned thing.” Grandma stood, squaring herself. “If he wants you, he’ll have to come get you.” She hesitated, and for a moment looked ashamed. “I talked to him yesterday. He won’t be able to fetch you back for a long while. He’s behind on that shed he’s building in town. He can’t pack up and drive to Arizona, not while the weather holds and he and the boys can work long days.” Grandma’s scheme was well plotted. Dad always worked from sunup

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘How’re you doing with her?’ asks Mandy. She’s sitting on my sofa rolling a cigarette, looking amazing, like a rural punk princess from an unlikely Thomas Hardy novel. I tell her that the hawk is surprisingly tame and everything’s going well. But it is a dreadful lie. When they’d knocked on the door and roused me from sleep I knew I had to maintain some desperate fiction of competence. And so far I’d managed this, though there’d been a nasty moment when Mandy looked at me with concern in her eyes and I realised my own were red and raw. It’s OK, I told myself. She’ll think I’ve been crying about Dad. I pick up the hawk and stand there like someone with a present at a party and no clear idea to whom I should hand it. ‘Lie down, Jess,’ says Stuart. The black and white English pointer they’ve brought flops onto the rug and lets out a sigh. I unhood Mabel. She stands on tiptoe, the tip of her beak pressed to her spangled and silvery chest, looking down at this new phenomenon that is a dog. The dog looks at her. So do we. There is a curious silence. I mistake it for anger. For disappointment. For anything but what it is: astonishment. A look of wonder passes over Stuart’s face. ‘Well,’ he says, eventually. ‘You’ve got gold, there. I thought she’d freak out completely. She’s very well manned.’ ‘Really?’ ‘She’s so calm, Helen!’ says Mandy. It takes me a while to even half-believe them, but it helps that I manage to hood Mabel without too much fuss – and after two cups of tea and an hour in their company the world is bright again. ‘Don’t drag your feet,’ Stuart says as they leave. ‘Get her out of the house. Take her outside. Man her in the streets.’ I know he is right. It’s time for the next stage of training. Carriage is what falconers call walking with a hawk to tame it, and all my books insisted it was the key to a well-trained gos. ‘The key to her management is to carry, carry, carry,’ wrote Gilbert Blaine. It was ‘the grand secret of discipline’ to Edward Michell. Back in the seventeenth century Edward Bert had explained that when you walk with a hawk ‘her eye doth still behold change of objects’, which is why carriage works – and why you can’t tame a hawk by keeping her indoors. Such a hawk ‘will endure nothing, because shee hath not beene made acquainted with any thing’, he says. Oh, Edmund Bert, I think. I wish it was still the seventeenth century. There’d have been fewer things out there to frighten my hawk.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  By the time we get to the hill I’m practically catatonic. There, at the top of the hill, is Stuart’s Land Rover. We walk up the track. It’s getting dark. Mabel looks ragingly keen to fly for the three minutes it takes to walk up there, and I start to relax. But she takes one look at the nylon kite that Stuart has been using to help train his falcon to climb high into the sky – takes one look at this triangular splash of fluttering primary colours, looks me in the face, and then bates. Bate. Bate. Bate. Stuart persuades me not to go home. ‘We’ll find something for her to fly at,’ he says. ‘She’ll settle down.’ She does, a bit. So do I. I try to unkink my knotted shoulders and take deep gulps of cooling air. I am stressed. I don’t normally fly hawks free like this. Normally I’d call her to the fist on the creance as usual, then untie the creance and fly her once or twice without it. Only later would I try flying her at quarry. But I defer to Stuart’s knowledge: he knows about goshawks and he’s done this many times before.