Mockingbird Mourning Crow
an essay from Jeffrey G. Moss
Too many late nights and early mornings this spring Yvonne and I are jolted awake by the shrill calls of a loud bird in the shrubs right outside our bedroom. In the heavy dark, in a late season dusting of snow, a deluge, on a clear, moonlit night, windows open or closed, it doesn’t matter. The bird’s pleas and appeals puncture our slumber.
On a few occasions we have lain there, sung back, and giggled, like kids. Most nights we curse and mutter, cover our heads with pillows, and sink back into shallow sleep.
Prior to setting my phone to record, the medium—a middle-aged blonde with a Long Island accent and glossy nails—laid down the ground rules. She is a conduit to spirit, she said. She has guides, can see and interpret what spirit reveals, but she definitely cannot see into the future.
Her first recorded words are, “This man, your father, has been following me around all day. He is so excited to have this opportunity.” I’ve replayed the audio file many times. I remember she gazed thoughtfully past my left shoulder for a moment the way folks watch sports or the news on a screen at the bar while maintaining a conversation, in two places at once.
“He would like you to pass along happy birthday wishes,” she says.
She’s referring to my youngest brother, David. Today is his birthday. April 4th. There is no way she could know this. David does not maintain any social media presence beyond a very sparse LinkedIn account.
“Dad also says that he has been looking after your younger son. His name sounds like your brother’s.”
My younger son’s name is Derek.
“He says this son is stuck and that he is helping push him forward… to his destiny.”
Derek turned 27 a few weeks back, and we had a heart-to-heart about potential, substantial life changes just a couple days ago.
“Your father’s indicating to me that it’s the least he can do since he didn’t get it right with you.”
There’s an awkward extended pause. She is straddling realms.
“How’s your sleep been lately?” she asks.
“Not so great. Definitely waking up tired. Why?”
“Your father’s been coming to speak with you. Every night. That’s what he’s showing me. Every night. There’s much to be resolved between you.”
“This is what we know,” I say. “The narrator’s name is Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch, daughter of Atticus, younger sister of Jem. Her mother is deceased.”
My 8th graders, 13- and some 14-year-olds at this point in the school year, look at me as if I’ve taken too much cold medicine.
“Let’s dig in and do some thinking,” I say. “Patterns. It’s all about patterns, readers. Chapter ten, please.”
I read aloud the often-quoted section where Atticus explains to Jem that he can use his BB gun to shoot all the blue jays he wants, if he can hit them, but that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. I include the typically neglected lines where Miss Maudie clarifies Atticus’ claim. It’s a sin, she says, because mockingbirds do no harm; they only bring music and delight.
“Follow me over to chapter 30,” I say.
Atticus explains to Scout the importance of keeping Boo’s deeds and identity a secret. Smart cookie that she is, Scout spouts the best possible response, how revealing the facts of the previous night’s events and bringing Boo into the limelight would be like shooting a mockingbird.
“Who sees it?” I ask. “Who sees the pattern? Who’s the mockingbird Scout’s referring to? And why?”
Long before Kasey Musgraves had a public radio hit with her song “Cardinal,” long before she asked the bird if it were bringing her a message from the other side, I knew that cardinals were special.
When I was a kid Mom often pointed out cardinals at the feeder in our back yard. Their vibrant red in the dull, Brooklyn winter brought her hope, she said.
The only baseball cap Mom ever owned, despite being a devoted New York Mets fan, was a St. Louis Cardinals hat. I don’t know where it came from, but it rested for over a decade on the rear shelf of her beige Ford Tempo.
As her health declined she found some joy dying her thinning hair bright colors. I doubt it was the official name of the color, but her favorite was one I privately dubbed Cardinal Red.
These days, when I look out through the kitchen window and see cardinals dancing on the railing of our back deck I’m pretty confident Mom is near.
A few minutes into the reading the medium says, “My spirit guides are showing me that the two of you have shared many lifetimes. Your father’s chuckling. I don’t know why he thinks it’s funny, but you are like oil and water. Different perspectives. In at least one lifetime you were combative, opposite twins. Like you find in The Bible.
“His is that military-like, narrow-minded point of view and yours is the opposite, like you might’ve been at Woodstock or something. A free spirit ready to soar.
“Your father says that if he had to do it all again he would listen better, to you and others…
“Your dad’s ruling the roost this afternoon. There are others on the other side that would like to come through,” she says, “but he needs this more than anyone. They understand. Do you understand?”
I suppose I nodded, because there’s another gap in the audio. More gazing.
Student hands shoot into the air.
“Boo Radley. It’d be a sin to bring him out in public. It’d destroy him,” one says.
“He only did good things, like the stuff in the tree. For the kids,” another adds.
“The blanket on Scout’s shoulders.”
“Sewing Jem’s pants.”
“Saving their lives!”
“Excellent,” I say. “Excellent thinking. Now, what if I told you that there are other mockingbirds in the novel. The title could actually be plural, To Kill Mockingbirds.”
A collective “Huh?”
One student calls out, “You mean there’s more?”
“This is just the beginning,” I reply.
One bitter, winter day Dad hacked at the frozen lake with a two-handed axe so we could try ice fishing. He huffed and chopped and the chips ticked off our cheeks. Just as the reverberating, fracturing ice sent people scurrying to shore, a group of a half dozen crows cawed and took off into the blinding, gray sky.
There was the curious looking crow on the low hemlock bough that next summer right after I stopped Dad from shooting a woodchuck feasting on romaine butts and cucumber skins in the compost pile at the far end of the backyard.
Just a few years ago, I spent an hour or so at the abandoned Scout camp Dad and I attended twenty-five years apart, that one loud, incessant crow in the canopy. The whole time I was there.
Most recently, on numerous occasions since his passing, there’s been a lone crow calling out from the nautical themed façade of the market he enjoyed shopping at during his visits north. I am there two or three times a week.
The pattern is irrefutable.
“He’s been through a lot,” she says. “He’s a good man who’s been through it. Your dad.”
She was right, of course. Dad lost his mom, my biological grandmother, to breast cancer when he was fifteen, his baby sister, my aunt, to the same pernicious disease when she was in her early thirties. Later on, he lost his father to prostate cancer, his younger brother to a religious cult.
My parents divorced when I was six, the eldest of three sons. They had built a narrative of persistent, defiant, undying love. That’s how Mom described it, but that position crumbled more with each child. My youngest brother was an infant when they separated.
Dad never discussed his pain of any of his losses, his leaving. Not with me, anyway. Not even when I was an adult, a husband, a father. And definitely not before he died. I’m angry with him for not sharing.
“This is why he’s here,” the medium says. “He sees the big picture. He sees where you are coming from. He’s showing me that he’s read your journals, agrees with you…”
“Excuse me,” I interrupt. “He’s read my writing?”
“Mmmhmm. He’s read everything and he thinks you’re right. But no apologies from him. He’s a tough old bird, huh?”
“Let me help us out with a little more info,” I say, and project a document.
AIM:
To identify and collect text evidence about the “metaphoric” mockingbirds in To Kill a Mockingbird.
FACTS:
Mockingbirds are everywhere in the US and beyond
Mockingbirds mimic (mock) other birds’ sounds and have no ‘real’ voice of their own
Mockingbirds are fierce defenders of their own nests and territory
“Does anyone have thoughts about which character might be another metaphoric mockingbird?”
Crickets in the classroom so I offer, “No real voice means something like no one listens to them.”
“Ooh, I get it. Tom Robinson, right?” a student says.
“African Americans in the South had no voice,” another adds.
“Like what Miss Maudie says. Tom only wanted to help Mayella. He only did good.”
“The jury didn’t listen to him.”
“It’s a sin what happened to him. A real sin.”
I’ve watched crows using their bulk to muscle in on songbirds’ nests. The smaller birds screech and peck and dive at the villainous intruder. Sometimes the crow squawks off in retreat, sometimes there’s the sound of the crying chick in its black beak.
Dad, too, would swoop in and use his strength to get what he wanted, usually for my brothers and me to behave. He didn’t hit us, he clamped down and dug his talons into our clavicles, elbows, wrists until we wept and surrendered.
By the time I was strong enough to repel his physicality he was gone, migrated to Florida. Decades later, after he came north to visit and I requested he stop grabbing my sons the way he grabbed my bothers and me, Dad phoned and issued a decree from his perch on the 18th floor of his beachfront coop.
“I can’t do this any more,” he said. “We’re done as father and son.”
Suddenly, as if stricken by a cramp, the medium gasps.
“Okay. Okay. You’re not going to believe this,” she says. “Your dad… your dad is showing me that he… that he killed a man. Not in the line of duty. No. Not with a weapon. By accident. A blunt force kind of thing. Maybe a hit and run. In his younger days. He left the scene. No one knows or knew.”
I listen to this section of the recording more than any other. No matter how loud I turn the volume up, I don’t hear myself respond. No gasp, gulp, or audible recoil, yet each time I hear the medium speak these words I see it, a crackle of lightning in the heart of a nighttime storm, and I understand why Dad became a parole officer. The need to have power over those vying for release or working to stay free. If one can live with their own dishonor while controlling the guilty they cannot be of them.
“He’s hanging and shaking his head,” she says. “He’s humble and sad and embarrassed.”
Why did he choose to trust me with this information? And why now? There is no pattern.
“Let’s think,” I say. “We’ve got this. One more mockingbird. A character who only does good, has been everywhere in this book, is a fierce defender of their territory, but no one really listens to them, and it’s a sin…”
“Jem?”
“No, sorry.”
“Calpurnia?”
“Again, no. Sorry.”
“Ooooh. Scout! It’s her, right?”
“Can you keep going?” I say.
“Well, Scout’s the narrator so she’s, like, everywhere. And she kicked that guy for grabbing Jem, spoke up for her father, and she knows not to reveal Boo’s, I mean Arthur’s, actions to everyone, so… protective. People tell her to hush all the time. Except Atticus, of course, cause he’s Atticus, perfect dad and human and all that. And… and it’s horrible that Scout has to learn how nasty the world can be at such an early age. I mean, she’s like eight. That’s the sin part. Kinda killed her childhood, right?”
MORE CROW FACTS FROM THE INTERNET:
The collective nouns for a group of crows are a horde, a mob, a parliament, a storytelling, and, of course, a murder.
Crows are the only birds ever observed using tools, like shaping a piece of wood and inserting it in a tree or fence post to root out insects. Researchers have seen a captive crow carry a cup of water and add the liquid to dry mash to eat.
Crows are not as strong as we think. For instance, a crow’s beak is not powerful enough even to tear into a dead squirrel. It must wait for another creature to open the carcass up, or for the carrion to decompose.
The American crow lives a double life.
“I see it on your face. It’s a lot. Having access to all this. It’s a lot for me and he’s not my dad or anything. He acknowledges that you’ve done the work. He cannot take any credit for the man you are today. He’s glad you have the sort of family he couldn’t provide, that you wanted. He appreciates your efforts with your sons. He wants you to feel proud for your accomplishments.”
The bell rings. “Great thinking today!”
As I begin to re-set for next period, a student’s voice comes from across the room, near the door.
“Mr. M, I get it.”
I look over.
“She’s on a journey to figure it all out, right? Her name is Scout. C’mon, it’s kind of obvious.”
“Nice one,” I say.
“And she’s a mockingbird and a Finch, get it?”
“Love that.”
“Do you think she will? Figure it out, I mean. Is there a sequel?”
“No. No sequel. This is it,” I say, “but if Scout’s told us a full story have faith that she’s figured it out. Like we all figure things out. Just takes time.”
The next group of students is already filtering in.
“We’ll talk some more tomorrow, okay. Okay? Don’t be late for your next class.”
“Thanks, Mr. M. Later, Mister M,” the student says and blends into the hallway throng.
A couple of weeks after the reading, sleep deprived and frazzled, Yvonne half-jokingly suggests I shoot the bird in a shrub outside our bedroom window. I tell her I do not own a BB gun.
Curious what type bird our nemesis might be I download Merlin, an app from Cornell Labs. It identifies birds from their songs and calls. In the daytime, there are more cardinals and blue jays and varieties of finches and sparrows singing and chirping in the arborvitaes and birch trees in our backyard than I imagined.
I do not need the app to identify the crows that come and go from a nearby stand of oak trees. At dusk, settling in for the night, their garrulous, guttural chatter drowns out all other creatures.
I try out Merlin over consecutive nights. The pattern of the sleep-piercing birdcalls is conclusive: northern mockingbird, every time.
After 32 years guiding 13/14 year olds in crafting their worlds, Jeffrey G. Moss finally followed some of his own writing advice. His creative non-fiction has appeared in Cagibi, Hunger Mountain Review, Under the Gum Tree, Hippocampus, Cleaver, and elsewhere. Find his published work here.
