I took the question to mean: Did I like my name? No one had ever asked me that before. “Both,” I decided. “I was named for my mother.”
“Is she the good part or the bad part?”
“She’s dead,” I said simply, as if death trumped character evaluation. But in truth, I hadn’t known her well enough to determine. I was old enough to know that death wasn’t always bad, and mothers weren’t always good.
He waited for me to explain further and, when I didn’t, said: “I’ll call you Ethel. You can call me Henry.”
“Thank you,” I said, mildly surprised. “Your family has the big hall. My father knows yours—he’s the brewer.”
I studied him as he walked in front of me—looking at his undershirt sticking out of his collar, the way his hair curled a bit at the nape of his neck, and his gangling, energetic stride. He showed me a trove of berries, thicker and bigger and riper, growing much closer to the water’s edge. I marveled at the size of them, hurrying to fill my basket, pausing only to push the bursting fruit into my mouth.
The encounter might have been forgettable, except that as we stood there, me purple-fingered and purple-mouthed, he had shushed me, stilled me, reaching out a hand to stop my movement. He pointed up.
Above us, in the sky, there were two wild hawks, both with wings spread. They flew together, in a dance, their bodies alternately fat and thick or like a blade. The air, solid, then liquid, did their bidding. They’d float side by side and then one would tilt, the flourish of a wrist, and slide beneath the other. A feathered roll and a swift follow and both soared once more. They moved like water on the surface of a stream, like a trill of music, like the sensation of your stomach dropping to your groin.
Thus, my first memory of Henry: the taste of berries, his hand tight on my wrist, both of us looking upward, with reverence.
The next few years, when Henry saw me in the village or at the market, he would say hello, and call me Ethel.
Hello, Ethel: Once when I was picking up extra cheese from the stall. I’d hardly turned around in time to say hello back.Hello, Ethel: A year later, and him a bit taller, when we passed one another at a harvest celebration, the food heaped in piles and the fires smoking. And then, another year passed, and aHello, Ethel, when I stumbled upon him alone with his bird.
Stumbled uponis perhaps not accurate. Alongside all of Henry’sHello, Ethels—each instance remembered and held close—I had spied and catalogued the comings and goings of his family. More specifically, I had observed what they did with their birds.
From the inside of a broom shrub, surrounded by yellow flowers, I watched the mews at the edge of the Tremaine property. Each bird had its own compartment, with a perch on a raised platform and a large screened window. The falconers cleaned these compartments along with the equipment they housed, exercised the hawks in the yard, and took copious notes in various books and ledgers. Before feeding the birds, they weighed them on a brass scale unlike any I’d seen. They trained the birds with bait on lines and I watched from the scratchy confines of the shrub as the raptors flew away and returned again, their bodies alternating between a forceful clumsiness—the flap and cluster of wings, the abrupt grip of the talons, the mash of meat in a tendoned fist—and an incredible, weightless grace.
And from behind rocks and trees at the edges of various fields and forest clearings, I watched the Tremaines themselves: exercising the birds, walking them—the falcons like soft gargoyles hulking on gloved fists—feeding them, talking to them, discussing them. I heard a new vocabulary—wingover,imping,cadge,trounce—words I would notdefine until later but remembered all the same. I heard words I knew—weathering,haggard,rouse,bate—used in ways I didn’t recognize. The foreign language both excluded and beckoned to me.
Falconry, at its core, is taking a creature that is primordial, instinctive, beautifully primitive, and fundamentally selfish and teaching it obedience, order, and fidelity. Watching the birds and their handlers, fresh out of daily lessons for comportment and fan signals and feminine restraint, is it any wonder I was enthralled? It was not enough to listen to and observe the falconers in their weathered mews yard, to spy on the Tremaines from a distance; I wanted to be closer to the birds, as close as they’d let me. I wanted to know what it would feel like to have a falcon land on my outstretched arm, to look into its eyes and understand its wisdom.
I couldn’t do that hiding in a bush.
I might have revealed myself. Or it might have been an accident. Either way, one day, Henry caught me.
He was manning his bird—I would learn later that it was a merlin, small and agile—and I was watching from behind a large slab of granite. Instead of flushing the prey, Henry stood waiting for murmurations of smaller birds. When these unnatural clouds appeared, undulating to rhythms of some unseen force, he would release his merlin from the glove, both of us witnessing its aerial pursuit. Each time a small bird was caught, there was a flurry of activity: the hawk morphing into a fearsome creature, an explosion of feathers, Henry procuring a piece of meat to urge his bird to release its quarry. But the minutes between these pursuits were long. I grew tired of watching the real clouds form and dissipate and form again in the sky above. So much of falconry is patience. Sitting behind the rock that day, I did not have any. I kicked some pebbles.
Without turning to face my hiding spot, Henry called: “Hello, Ethel.”
I stepped out from behind the rock, too eager to feel embarrassed. “How does it know to come back to you?”
“It’s nice to see you out here.”
“And why does it give you the little birds and not eat them?”
He looked at me, amused. “The food I give her is much easier than eating a bird. She’s happy to swap.”
I frowned. “She’s killing them for no reason?” We both looked down at the bag at Henry’s feet, inside of which were two dead birds.
“The starlings eat the crops and there are thousands more of them than there should be. And Miriam will eat them later besides.” He held up his glove, lifting his bird a few inches. “This is Miriam. Would you like to hold her?”
I hesitated, not because I didn’t want to, but because I wanted to so badly, I thought the moment deserved ceremony.
“Come on, then,” Henry said. He cast his merlin upward, and she flew onto a low branch of a nearby tree. When she had settled, he removed the glove.
Wordlessly, I went over and accepted the gauntlet. The weight and stiffness of it surprised me, but I slid my hand in, small in the large mouth. Unlike the jeweled buttons and embroidered tents, the glove was simple and crudely crafted: a string in place of laces, and the fingers, reinforced with extra padding, were bulky and unsightly. The thick leather extended past my elbow.
Henry nodded his encouragement. “Now hold out your arm. She will fly down and perch on it. No sudden movements; stay steady and calm.”
He moved us to the center of the clearing and showed me the angle to hold my arm and how to position my fingers, my thumb making a platform. Then, he let out a shrill three-note whistle—low–high–low—and with a few flaps, Miriam thrust herself off her branch. Wings wide, she swooped down, inches from the ground, before rising once more to come up onto my fist. I was surprised by the strength of her grip, the heft of her body.
