It was a hard winter, and the cold had seeped deep into the wood of my cabin, the crisp air impossible to warm no matter how much I fed the fire in my stove. My body felt stiff, my bereavement palpable always, my muscles in need of coaxing every time I stood still for too long.
One day, a couple of sapsucker woodpeckers landed on my porch as I was sweeping it clean of crumbly leaves. The birds were small, the red of their crowns duller than it should be, and sparse.
“Don’t you look poorly,” I said. It had been a while since I’d last heard my voice, and it surprised me with its resonance, the dark notes of its depth.
“We are on our way south,” the birds replied, “but are too weak from hunger to fly that far.”
“I’m sorry,” I replied, “but I have nothing to feed you.” And it was true; I had gone without much food myself, the last of my bread gone days before, though the reason behind this hardship was mostly neglect. Then, I remembered. My hands flew to my chest, which was still painfully heavy and full. I said, baring a breast: “Unless you’d want my milk.”
The birds teetered on the wooden balustrade. “We normally drink sap,” they said, thoughtful. “But we suppose milk is a little like sap, too, and people are indeed a bit like trees.”
I waited as the birds considered my offer, exchanging nervous glances between them, and furtive tilts of the head. I understood something passed between them, though I was not then, neither am I now, a very good student of the language of birds.
“We have never before met a man who has milk,” the sapsuckers said. “But you are a man indeed. And indeed you have milk?”
“Yes,” I told them, “that’s right.” I tried not to picture anything as I mouthed the next words: “It was meant for a child that died.”
The birds pondered this for a while longer. “We are not glad the child died,” they said finally, flying up to my chest. “But we are thankful for the milk.”
• • •
The birds came back every morning and every evening. They were always polite and careful not to damage my flesh as they drank their fill and then thanked me before they flew away.
One evening, as I was buttoning up my shirt, I heard a rustling in the shrubs that flanked my cabin on the left. Everything in my body felt alert at once, and I instinctively used my deepest voice to say: “If you mean me harm, don’t come near. I have a gun.” I did, indeed, have a gun, but it was locked away, unused except once, and I would like to keep it that way. The leaves rustled again. My ears rang.
Then a man came out of the foliage, his arms open, his palms, empty, facing me. “I mean no harm,” he said, his voice nasal and as deep as mine. He stumbled forward, and I noticed a bandaged ankle, a shoe soaked in blood. “I need help.” He lowered his arms and supported himself on his uninjured leg, panting slightly, as if breathing caused him some pain. “Shelter,” he said. “Some food and medicine, if you have it. If you can spare it.”
I descended the steps of my porch to help him into the house. The ringing was still in my ears, my faithful, internal alarm—but it was so rare I ever met someone like me. I felt I needed to know this man, to share some of my life with him, and to allow him to share some of his with me, to see where our stories converged and where they differed wildly. Every such encounter, I’ve found, expands one’s world in a way that makes existence a little more possible—perhaps, even, a little less of a paradox.
I positioned myself next to the man and let him wrap his arm around my shoulders. “Okay?” I asked, and he nodded. Slowly, we walked into my home.
I deposited the man on my sofa and gave him a stool on which to rest his leg. I fetched a washbasin with soapy water to clean his wound, and some antibiotic ointment I found in the first aid kit alongside a length of gauze. “You know how to do this, yes?” I asked, handing him everything, and he said, “Yes.” His eyes lingered on mine for a while, and the ringing came again, louder, so I stepped back and sat in the armchair on the other side of the coffee table, near the fireplace and its wrought iron poker, just in case.
“You didn’t expect me to clean it for you, did you?” I asked.
The man, at last, lowered his eyes. “No, of course not,” he said. “Sorry.” He started cleaning his wound. “I’m Aaron,” he said.
“David,” I replied. “What happened to your leg?”
There was a tension in his shoulders then, and a hesitation brief enough that I knew he was about to lie to me. “I was stupid,” he said. “Decided to leave the hiking trail. Stepped right into a rabbit trap.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, I’m glad you ran into me.”
“Thank you for your help.”
“I’m afraid I have nothing to feed you,” I said, like I’d said to the birds—and, I supposed, this man could not be sustained the same way the sapsuckers were. “I’ll go to town tomorrow and bring back some things.” I still avoided the town, though nobody knew me, and the one I was running from had no reason to look for me there.
“You don’t have to do that,” Aaron said, as if hearing the unspoken part. “You’ve already done enough.” That lingering gaze again. I looked away.
“I’ll make up the sofa for you.”
When I came back with an armful of bedding, Aaron was already asleep. His head rested on the brown corduroy of the sofa’s armrest in an awkward angle that allowed me to study his face. I found it open and pleasing: deep-set eyes, a soft jaw, the kind of eyelashes that will always give men like us away. I decided right then that, no matter what he’d done and what he was running from, I would trust this man to be a good one.
I covered him with the patchwork blanket I’d brought in from the bedroom. It had been given to me by my mother a lifetime ago. A wedding gift.
• • •
When I woke in the morning, Aaron was still asleep on the sofa, but the bedding I had left on the coffee table had been laid underneath him, and his head rested on the yellow-flowered pillow I had plucked from my own bed. As promised, I drove into town and brought back milk, eggs, and bread, as well as some vegetables good for a stew.
Upon my return, the birds came back again and I, thinking nothing of it, gave them my own milk. I saw Aaron watching only after the birds had chirped their thanks and gone.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to creep.”
I finished buttoning up my shirt, realizing I was not the least bit embarrassed. Why would I be?
“You’re lactating,” Aaron said then. It wasn’t quite a question, but I felt I needed to answer anyway.
“I had a baby not long ago,” I said. “He died.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s horrible.”
I nodded.
“How long have you lived here alone?”
“How do you know I live alone?”
He shrugged. Didn’t even need to call my bluff. You are a guy who nurses birds with your own breast milk, David. Of course you live alone.
I hadn’t talked to a person in months. And now, in front of this stranger, the words were spilling out of me. “I used to live with someone I loved and who I thought loved me. We lived together in the city for a long time, since before I knew who I was. When I figured it out, he wasn’t happy. He tried to change me.” I paused. I was saying so much and yet so little. “I ran away, came to live here. Found out I was pregnant. Had the child.” I trailed off. What else was there to say?
Aaron studied me. I didn’t mention the gun.
“Let’s go inside,” I said.
He followed. We made stew; I sat him at the table with his leg on one of the chairs and had him chop vegetables while I fed the spices to the pot.
“Good stew,” he said when he tried it, and I smiled, said, “Yes, some things always turn out good.”
• • •
The birds came back the next day, faithful like the sunrise. As they nursed, I asked them if they’d seen Aaron, and they said, “Indeed, we have.” Then I asked them if they liked him, and they said, “Indeed, indeed, we think he’s a good man.”
I fed him more of my stew that day, and as he sat at my table and brought a spoonful of rutabaga to his lips, I ambushed him, demanding the truth. Where had he really come from? He was no hiker. He had nothing with him, and his clothes didn’t fit him well.
“You noticed how my clothes fit, then?” he asked, deflecting, something almost playful in his eye.
But I wasn’t going to be distracted by play. “What were you running from?” I insisted.
He looked down at his steaming bowl, all the mischief gone, and I can’t say I didn’t mourn it a little.
After a few moments, he relented. “I was imprisoned,” he said. “I escaped.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Something stupid,” he replied. “When I was very young.” He looked at my bowl. “You aren’t eating,” he said. He reached for my spoon, picked it up and offered it to me. “You need nourishment, too, you know,” he said. “You can’t only give.”
“Violent?” I asked. “What you did.”
“No.” He put down my spoon again.
I thought. There was a men’s prison not far from here. I tried to imagine what life must have been like there, for someone like him, like me. “Okay,” I said.
He’d rested his own spoon on the side of his bowl. “If you want me to leave now,” he said, “I will.”
I looked out the window. The poplar tree had turned entirely yellow, its white bark furrowed with grey. Soon it would have no leaves left at all. “Finish your soup,” I said.
He did, and then I helped him move back to the sofa. This time, I sat beside him. He looked at me.
I pointed at his shirt. Tried not to feel any envy at the flatness of his chest. “When did you have it done?” I asked.
“More than a decade ago,” he said. “As soon as I could.” He paused. “I was lucky. Do you want to?” he asked.
“Most people can’t afford it,” I said. It came out more pointed than I intended. Or maybe exactly as much.
Aaron nodded. If I had wounded him, he didn’t show it. Neither of us spoke for a while.
“But it’s a good thing you do for these birds,” he said then. “I could never have done what you do.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “Having milk come out of you,” he said. “The idea always horrified me.”
“Do I horrify you?”
He stared at me, surprised. “No. Not in the least.” He paused then, and I enjoyed it this time, his directness, that lingering gaze. “May I kiss you?” he asked eventually, finally.
I considered it. I hadn’t been kissed in so long. Hadn’t wanted to. “Please,” I said. “Yes.”
He did.
“How’s your leg?” I asked then. His mouth tasted like the pits of apricots.
“Better.”
“Can you walk?”
“Walk where?”
I took his hand and led him to the bedroom.
• • •
The first time we lay together was awkward and halting, and at the end of it Aaron went back to sleep on the sofa that by then I thought of as his bed. But the next time, we explored each other’s bodies with care and even admiration. He liked to kiss the base of my neck as I lay on top of him, and he opened himself up to me the way the man I used to love never had.
I soon forgot about the sofa, and Aaron spent every night of his stay in my bed.
• • •
When my milk finally ran dry, I was bereft. I had known that day was coming, and I’d even dared hope I would feel relieved. But it was not so. I felt my loss somewhere even deeper than before. I had dark days when my body was empty and I no longer wished to live. I had days when my body was full of spikes, that I wanted myself and everything around me obliterated and unseen. “Go away,” I told Aaron then. “I have nothing more to offer you, or the birds.”
He sat with me then and said, “You’re worth more than what you give.” He said it again and again, hoping that, one day, he would be heard.
He never came near me without asking, never grumbled or negotiated when I wanted my body left untouched. I’d heard before that time and kindness is what it takes, mostly, for a heart to heal, but I’d never believed it to be true. And yet, with time, I surprised myself. One day I realized I already believed that I, too, was allowed to say no, just like everyone else in the world. It was a simple, natural thing, like accepting that, when dropped, a pebble will sink into water.
The dark days still dawned, but they were fewer now, and farther apart. The poplar regained its foliage, the underside of its leaves silver in the breeze. Aaron and I had coffee in the morning and stew in the evening, and in between we posed questions to each other about our bodies and the things that gave us joy. “How does this make you feel?” we asked each other, “And this? And this?” and answered, “Like a drop of water. Like falling into a crevasse. Like running out of breath. Like a man turning into a tree.”
• • •
I waited for men in uniforms to come looking for him, to take him away, but they never did—eventually, I reassured myself they had bigger catastrophes to attend to, or Aaron’s infractions didn’t rate highly enough to merit the looking. The birds left after my milk ran out and they were strong enough to fly, but Aaron stayed well past the time when his leg had healed.
I knew he’d have to leave regardless, sooner or later, and understood that there are seasons in our lives that cannot be indefinitely prolonged, that we are, after all, only a little like trees.
And so it was that Aaron no longer lived here by the time the birds came back, and he was still not here when they left and came back and left once more. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again, but the birds keep to their schedule, faithfully, every year. Together, we linger under the branches of my poplar tree late into the season, even though I no longer have anything to feed them, and, perhaps, no need to. I tell them stories about Aaron instead, and they sit on my balustrade to listen. “So, then,” the birds ask me when I’m done, “was he indeed a good man?”
“Indeed he was,” I say. “Indeed, indeed,” and, like a season, I let him go.
• • •