Osprey Island

The scar—the scar Suzy’d held under her hand as if to hold his body together in one piece—the scar was from fighting, yes. He’d gotten the injury in a bar in Tucson shortly after he’d fled, in a fight with a vet who’d called him a traitor and a coward and pushed him down. Roddy stumbled, beer in hand, and fell hard against the pool table, his beer bottle breaking on impact between the table and his body. The felt surface was ruined, and Roddy suffered wounds that required emergency surgery in a hospital where the cops had no trouble catching up with him, leveling charges of draft evasion. And that, as his mother would say, was that.

Fourteen

THE BROODINESS OF HENS A Brief Lesson in Avian Reproduction

The chicken, like the Mormon of old, is a polygamous creature. At any given moment, and with little pomp or circumstance, the male selects the female whose vent is closest to his own. He drops one wing to the ground, grabs his intended under the other wing, and mounts. Flapping his wings, the male balances, his vent flush against the hen’s. Transfer of sperm from his cloaca to her oviduct is swift; the male dismounts. An avian sex act lasts roughly fifteen seconds. It is only afterward, in fluffing her feathers, that the female appears to experience any satisfaction whatsoever.

—WALKER WINSTON, A Gentleman’s Guide to Raising Chooks

IN JULY OF 1969, a year after Roddy had left Osprey Island in the skirmish of his parents’ tug-of-war, Eden Jacobs was reading the latest issue of National Geographic, when, between a tribute to Ike Eisenhower and a photo travelogue of Switzerland (“Europe’s High-Rise Republic”), she discovered an article of considerably greater personal interest. The opening photograph was arresting: a screaming bird, its wings spanned across a double-page spread. “THE OSPREY: Endangered World Citizen.” It had been quite some time since Eden had spotted an osprey on her daily beach walk. Mornings, Eden laced on her sturdiest shoes and patrolled a stretch of Scallopshell Beach, Roderick’s heavy WWII-issue spyglasses trained to the sky. She did not waver in her morning rituals, and over the years could boast having spotted any number of owls and red-tailed hawks and what have you. But the sighting of an osprey, its eagle-wings stretched majestically across the sky, that was rare—even on an island named for the creature—and, by 1969, getting rarer. The National Geographic article confirmed it: the osprey, as a species, was nearing extinction.

“It’s because of chemicals,” Eden told her husband that evening at dinner. She helped him to another serving of potatoes. “Dee—Dee— Tee,” she enunciated. “It’s one of the ones they use for pesticide. That’s what’s killing off the ospreys.”

“Maybe they’re pests,” Roderick suggested. He pushed a forkful of meat into his mouth. Relations in their home had been strained in the turmoil and wake of their son’s departure, but it was Roderick who’d been broken by it, not Eden. She had won—the boy was off in Canada with the rest of the cowards—and Roderick had taken his defeat badly, if quietly, in the end. It had taken the fight out of him.

“You hush,” Eden scolded. “This is serious.”

Roderick succumbed. He was a large man, physically imposing, but really no match for his wife in most things. Too heavy a drinker, he had never overcome the sense of his own intellectual inadequacy— that he was, ironically, just intelligent enough to recognize.

“Listen,” Eden instructed. She lifted the magazine from the table beside her. “If taken from an insecticide-polluted area, fish may introduce poisons into the birds’ bodies. The author”—and here Eden’s voice rose with importance—“world-famed ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson”—she spoke his name as if he were her own flesh and blood, repeating it as if to congratulate herself on such a prestigious relation—“Roger Tory Peterson believes that this may be the reason for egg failures in Connecticut River eyries.” Eden looked up at her husband. “We’re just across the sound from there,” she said, “and they mention us in the article.” She flipped a few pages forward and began reading again: “Ospreys are more than just birds to be enjoyed. They are an alarm system of things gone haywire in the river, the estuary, and the sound. They are sensitive indicators of the environment.”

“Probably true,” Roderick conceded.

“More than probably,” Eden added. Then she said, “I’m going to do something about it.”

Roderick’s body tightened. “What are you, one woman, going to do about it?”

“I’m going to build nesting platforms,” she said, “first of all. To help them know they have a safe place to lay their eggs. But it’s the eggs themselves that are the problem,” she told him, “and they’re worst in this area. The eggs are breaking before they hatch. They weigh twenty-five percent less than they used to. The eggshells. Twenty-five percent less.”

“How are you . . . ?” But she didn’t let him finish.

“We have to stop them from using those pesticides,” she said. “I’m talking to Mayor Worth tomorrow.”

“There’s no farms on Osprey anymore,” Roderick said.

“And I probably can’t stop farmers from using them on the mainland,” she agreed, “but we can ban them from here for good so no one can start. And we can try to get to people so they know.”

“Whoa! There’s no we here, Eden. Stop that with we. This is you, Eden. This is you alone.” This was Roderick, putting his large foot down wherever he could, just to feel the stamp. Roderick was born on Osprey, met Eden on a summer trip to Maine, and had her knocked up and home with him on the island before Halloween, and though she’d succumbed to the facts of her life early on—wife, mother, Islander— she’d never acquiesced to Osprey’s ways. This embarrassed Roderick; it marked him as a man who couldn’t control his wife.

“Our garden.” Eden gestured toward the back of the house, where tomato vines grew in neat, staked rows, and beans climbed their tripod poles like trained ivy. “It’ll need to be twice the size next summer.” Her plans were long range. “Enjoy that roast”—she pointed to Roderick’s dinner plate—“because once the freezer’s emptied you’re not getting any more of it unless I can find a farmer who raises them without all that poison. Because that’s where it is,” she insisted, “in the food. And I won’t have it anymore. Not in my house. Unless you want to raise the pigs out back yourself. Otherwise, you need a chop or a steak, you get it down at Tubby’s or the Grill. Not here.” She paused. “We’ll turn the shed out back into a henhouse, so we’ll have eggs. The library’s ordering me a book about milk cows, but I just don’t know if we’ll have the room. They have to graze, you know.”