February
10 SAINT SCHOLASTICA
I went to the garden
house attic, as usual, after dinner. Climbed up the ladder,
observing all the hoes and shovels lying on the floor. I made my
way through the litter of old stove- pipes and broken strawberry
boxes to the chair by the window. On the chair is a sack, stained
with either paint, creosote, or the blood of something slaughtered.
I opened the small window (a pane fell out one day when I let it
slam; I can still see the fragments of glass on the red roof of the
shed below).
Today it
was wonderful. Clouds, sky overcast,
but tall streamers of sunlight coming down in a fan over the bare
hills.
Suddenly I became
aware of great excitement. The pasture was full of
birds–starlings. There was an eagle flying over the woods.
The crows were all frightened, and were soaring, very high, keeping
out of the way. Even more distant still were the buzzards, flying
and circling, observing everything from a distance. And the
starlings filled every large and small tree, and shone in the light
and sang. The eagle attacked a tree full of starlings but before he
was near them the whole cloud of them left the tree and avoided him
and he came nowhere near them. Then he went away and they all
alighted on the ground. They were there moving about and singing
for about five minutes. Then, like lightning, it happened. I saw a
scare go into the cloud of birds, and they opened their wings and
began to rise off the ground and, in that split second, from behind
the house and from over my roof a hawk came down like a bullet, and
shot straight into the middle of the starlings just as they were
getting off the ground. They rose into the air and there was a
slight scuffle on the ground as the hawk got his talons into the
one bird he had nailed. "In Him all things are made and in Him all
exist."
It was a terrible
and yet beautiful thing, that lightning, straight as an arrow, that
killed the slowest starling.
Then every tree,
every field was cleared. I do not know where all the starlings
went. Florida, maybe. The crows were still in sight, but over their
wood. Their guttural cursing had nothing more to do with this
affair. The vultures, lovers of dead things, circled over the
bottoms where perhaps there was something dead. The hawk, all
alone, in the pasture, possessed his prey. He did not fly away with
it like a thief. He stayed in the field like a king with the killed
bird, and nothing else came near him. He took his
time.
I tried to pray,
afterward. But the hawk was eating the bird. And I thought of that
flight, coming down like a bullet from the sky behind me and over
my roof, the sure aim with which he hit this one bird, as though he
had picked it out a mile away. For a moment I envied the lords of
the Middle Ages who had their falcons and I thought of the Arabs
with their fast horses, hawking on the desert's edge, and I also
understood the terrible fact that some men love war. But in the
end, I think that hawk is to be studied by saints and
contemplatives; because he knows his business. I wish I knew my
business as well as he does his.
I wonder if my
admiration for you gives me an affinity for you, artist! I wonder
if there will ever be something connatural between us, between your
flight and my heart stirred in hiding, to serve Christ, as you,
soldier, serve your nature. And God's love a thousand times more
terrible! Now I am going back to the attic and the shovels and the
broken window and the trains in the valley and the prayer of
Jesus.
