feet into the air before falling back to the stable floor, its left wing dragging. The horses whinnied. The dogs pulled and barked.
Adam took off his shirt and threw it over the owl. “Get the dogs out of the stable. I’ll take care of it,” he told me. I shut the door on the faint, soothing rise of his voice.
As I tucked the girls in, I considered, for the first time, that his voice might have qualities beyond what I heard and felt. Could he use it to heal? Was that what I’d heard him doing with the owl?
When he came in from the stable, my question seemed to surprise him. “No. Nothing like that. It’s just a different kind of voice.”
“Just a different kind of voice?” I echoed.
He grinned. “I admit it’s a good voice, a useful tool. A calm animal doesn’t fight what you need to do. I had to strap a splint to the owl’s wing.” He cupped his hands as if holding the bird. “He was so strong and light, Evelyn. I think he’ll be okay.”
“You really don’t know what you have, do you?”
“Oh, I know.” He lifted my hair off my shoulder and kissed my neck. “I know.”
In the morning, he fashioned a cage out of two crates and chicken wire. The girls were in charge of the mousetraps. Gracie set the traps and Rosie dropped the dead mice into the cage. On the days we caught no mice, we fed the owl meat or scraps from the table. The cats, one as pale as the owl, the other a pregnant calico, sometimes perched on top of the cage and hung their heads over the side, peering upside down at the owl that stared blankly back at them.
After a month, we freed the owl. Rosie had had her ride and both girls were ready for bed. The girls and I clustered outside in our pajamas under a bright moon. Adam held up the thick stick of the perch the owl clung to. He removed the makeshift hood. For a moment, the owl did not move. Turning its face toward Adam, it took one long, unblinking look, hopped from the stick to his gloved wrist, then, slowly lifting its wings, took silent flight. The girls oohed beside me. The white speck of the owl vanished quickly into the dark, distant bank of trees.
For once, the girls went to bed without protest. I kissed them, and Adam began singing for them—two songs, one for each girl. As I climbed into bed, I heard the familiar refrain of “Amazing Grace,” which Gracie considered her song. “Silent Night,” Rosie’s choice, followed.
I listened as Adam came down the hall, then felt him get in bed and spoon up behind me. He held me, but we did not sleep. It seemed to me that we were listening for something. Finally, I turned to him and he lifted my nightgown. I did not reach for the rubbers. I thought of the owl, of the impossible, silent lift of it into the air, as I drew my husband to me.
The owl, in all its wisdom, did not go far from the barn and stable mice. And it did not forget the curious cats. Not long after we freed it, I saw it hunched in the stable rafters when I took coffee out to the stable for Adam.
One morning, before the milking, I stopped to say hello to Darling. The cat had had her kittens by then, a bunch of orange tabbies and calicos that flickered around the barn. I found the bloody tail and most of the spine of an orange kitten draped over the corner post of Darling’s stall. I couldn’t imagine how it got there. Then I looked up. Our barn owl peered down, ghostly in the rafters. I banged the milk pail against the barn wall in protest. The owl simply tilted its wide, flat face down and stared impassively.
Outside, I bent over to bury the little spine so the girls would not find it. Bile surged up my throat. I dropped to my knees to vomit and recognized the particular nausea of early pregnancy. I’d had morning sickness with the other girls, but nothing this bad. The powerful waves of nausea ripped through me, the first indication that this pregnancy was different, not one but two babies.
I saw Granny Paynes once at Pearl’s when I was about five months along. She nodded tersely at my swollen belly and said,