Dead Eagle

The dead eagle was a problem.

Before he called the sheriff’s office, a two-desk operation in our upstate New York town, my father laid a makeshift flag over its corpse. Under his breath, he mused that the eagle’s death represented the death of America. It was 1973, and he said it was even worse than the oil crisis that had him waiting all day at our local pump.

On the phone, the deputy informed my father that legally we couldn’t yet touch it. Not only was the eagle a national symbol, but it was about to be declared endangered. We knew the deputy well—he once helped us scrub a swastika off our garage—and he said he would come by to determine if the eagle had been murdered.

I asked my father if he thought the eagle had been murdered.

“Absolutely,” he said.

In class the next day, I asked my teacher, Mr. Glendon, if I could make an announcement to our fifth-grade class during the few minutes he allotted for Student News. “Can you tell me what it’s about, Harry?” He called me Harry at my request, which I always thought was better than my full name, Harriet.

“It’s about a dead eagle.”

Mr. Glendon said, “Hmmmm. I trust this won’t be like your last announcement?”

My last announcement had rattled Mr. Glendon because when I stood on my desk and told the class that I wholeheartedly supported the Supreme Court’s decision to grant women abortion rights, he had to stop Sean Franklin from trying to knock me onto the floor while calling me a “fucking-Jewbag-baby-killer.” I assured Mr. Glendon that I would make this announcement from a sitting position and that it wouldn’t be controversial, even though I detested the idea that I had to curb my speech because of what it might do to my classmates. But since Sean Franklin had been permanently transferred down the hall on account of his repeating his ingenious nickname for me every day for a week, I felt confident that my class could handle my announcement about the eagle.

Seven minutes before our 3:15 dismissal, Mr. Glendon told the class to sit down for Student News. Fiona Winston shared that she’d gotten a puppy, but she forgot the breed and forgot its name. Mei Ling Chen shared that at the end of the school year, her family would return to China. Her lip quivered, and Mr. Glendon put his hand on her shoulder and said she would be a star in China too. (I tried not to roll my eyes.) Gary Somebody-Or-Other said he found his sister’s used sanitary napkin in the upstairs bathroom, and everyone either laughed or made gagging sounds.

Finally, Mr. Glendon called my name, and I announced that a bald eagle had been murdered—shot mid-flight—and had crashed onto the grass in front of our house. I focused on sounding true to the facts and said, “Dead upon impact, its thick yellow talons were curled under its twisted neck. One giant wing stood straight up, pointed towards the clouds, as if it had waved goodbye.”

The dismissal bell sounded just as I finished my sentence, but no one moved until Mr. Glendon said, “Wow. I guess we’ll hear more about that tomorrow.” 

Above the low murmurs, I shouted that there was a bullet hole in the eagle’s black chest which proved that it was a murder, and if anyone had any information it would be wise to contact the deputy.

On the way out of our classroom, Mei Ling said she was sorry about my eagle. Fiona said maybe her puppy was a beagle, which rhymed with eagle. Or maybe it was a Saint Bernard.

When I got home, the deputy was in our driveway. It was obvious he had already inspected the eagle.

“Hiya, Harriet. How was school today?” he asked.

Ignoring his question, I asked, “What do you think happened? Who do you think might have shot it?”

“It’s hard to know. I took the bullet out of its chest, so your dad can bury it now. If we get any leads, I can match the bullet to the gun. For now, keep your eyes and ears open. Anything suspicious, you let me know.” 

I loved the way he spoke to me, in a tone which matched my perception of myself—not like I was some stupid regular kid.

“Got it,” I said, official-like.

Inside, my mother was cooking dinner, a rare occasion. She wasn’t a bad cook, but she was a better scientist. Her cancer research was proving to be useful down at the university lab, and she told us that even though she had to endure unkind, sexist remarks from some of her colleagues, they couldn’t argue with her results. A new drug for advanced cancer was on the horizon, thanks to her. My father beamed when he added that.

At dinner, my younger twin brothers, Solly and Dave, recounted that at recess, Sean Franklin’s sister Mackenzie had called them over to the hopscotch court where she spit on their shoes. My mother asked them how they had handled it, while my father tried to look disinterested. I could see his jawbone moving back and forth, though, and I knew his molars were suffering.

Solly said they just walked away, and Dave said they told the monitor, but she ushered them inside because recess was over. No other adult at school said a word about it.

My mother glanced at my father and said to the boys that they would talk more later. I could see that this affected her because she swallowed hard and took a deep breath through her nose. (I would see her do the same thing in other moments of sadness, like when she told me that our favorite dog Kelev had come to the end of his life, and years later, when her Parkinson’s diagnosis would force her into early retirement.) But her recovery from that kind of emotion was remarkable. At once, she turned the conversation to the dead eagle. “We need to find a good place to bury the poor thing. Do you boys think you can run outside after dinner and look around? The spot should be soft, not too rocky. And we need it to be dry. Not near the stream, you hear?”

Solly and Dave nodded in agreement.

Then my mother turned to me and asked if I would find a good-sized stone to place on the eagle’s grave. It seems ridiculous to say it this way, but I felt the weight of the task immediately. Burying an eagle is no casual feat.

Right after dinner, before the burial, I called my best friend Vicky Johnson who lived a half-mile in the wrong direction. It was only the wrong direction because Mr. Abernathy’s house was dead-smack-in-the-middle of our houses, and Mr. Abernathy was known to hate kids enough to shoot at them. Vicky and I were forbidden to walk past, and each of our families only had one car, so that meant we had to wait for a parent who wasn’t at work or wasn’t too grumpy to drive us.

The evening of the burial I lodged the phone receiver between my chin and my shoulder, crossed my fingers, my legs, and my toes, and dialed Vicky’s house. When her mother picked up, with the little bit of fear I would always have when I spoke to her, I said, “Hello, Mrs. Johnson, this is Harriet Weinberg, and if it’s okay with you, would it be possible for you to drive Vicky over to my house tonight because we’re burying the eagle that was murdered, and I really want Vicky to be here on account of this is really unique and special.”

I heard Mrs. Johnson tell Vicky to finish her dessert and to quickly put her shoes on, and when she returned to the phone, Mrs. Johnson said, “Harriet, I’m very sorry about your eagle. Mr. Johnson will be glad to drive Vicky over.” In the background I heard Mr. Johnson groan.

The first time I met Mrs. Johnson was the day Vicky and I got in trouble for pinning Gloria I-Forget-Her-Last-Name to the mat in gym class. Gloria had called Vicky the N-word, and we weren’t having it. We ended up in the principal’s office, and somehow Vicky got sent home and I got sent back to class. When I got home, I asked my father to drive me to Vicky’s house so I could set the record straight—tell her that what happened to her wasn’t right, that I should have gotten sent home too, but the stupid principal wouldn’t listen.

Mr. Johnson was home that day recuperating from an incident with a circular saw, and while Vicky and I played with jacks, Hula-hoops, and Spirographs, he and my father talked about the best methods for growing a hardy tomato plant. When Mrs. Johnson came home from her job as a legal secretary to the only black lawyer in all of upstate New York, Vicky introduced me to her mother this way, “Mommy, this is the white girl who keeps telling me she likes my hair.”

Before I could say, “Nice to meet you,” Mrs. Johnson asked me if my parents used the term schvartze to describe black people. The way she said schvartze reminded me of Solly’s face every time he ate horseradish at Passover. I thought it was an interesting question to ask in a first conversation with someone, but it scared me. Even at that age, I could detect her hostility.

I answered with the truth. “Never. That word is not allowed. One time my grandmother was visiting from New Jersey and said it right as my father took a sip of coffee, and he nearly choked. My parents told her if she was going to talk that way, she’d be on the next bus back to Bergenfield.” I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but I remember thinking that if Gloria What’s-Her-Face spoke Yiddish, it would be part of her everyday vocabulary.

Mrs. Johnson said I could stay for dinner as long as it was okay with my parents, which it was.

Mr. Johnson and Vicky had taken the time to wash up and put on fresh clothing for the eagle’s burial. Mr. Johnson said he admired the stone I’d chosen, and I felt proud that I’d lugged it across the property myself. He and Vicky stood side by side behind my father, who was leading us in the Kaddish, and they did their very best to read off the transliteration cards we gave them. Afterwards, Mr. Johnson urged Vicky forward to stand next to me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way it felt when she grabbed my hand, the same way she did when we skipped around the playground at school. I had the urge to lay my head on her shoulder, but it was my turn to speak, so instead I craned my neck like I’d rehearsed, and projected the poem I’d written that afternoon into the sky:

“Once there was an eagle,

Majestic in flight,

Who crashed on our walkway,

In the dark of the night.

A serious murder,

Simply incomprehensible,

I vow to find out,

Whoever is responsible.”

Vicky swore under her breath that she’d help me in whatever way she could, and I knew I’d never have another friend as loyal.

I was proud of my vow, but I also knew it wasn’t likely that I would find out who murdered the eagle, given my lack of detective skills.

*

The day before Sean Franklin was transferred to another fifth-grade class, his mother requested a meeting in which Sean would apologize to me in front of the principal. Before we were called in, Sean and I sat side by side outside the principal’s office, while Mrs. Franklin and the principal talked privately. Sean didn’t take his eyes off his new Converse sneakers, but I did hear him mumble, “This is bullshit.”

“Sure is,” I added.

Mrs. Franklin wore a crisply ironed powder blue dress and eyeshadow to match. She seemed annoyed with Sean but not enough for it to feel sincere to me. And when she smiled at me and said, “Hello, Harriet,” something was off in her voice. I started to imagine that she’d been replaced by a robot.

The principal sounded rehearsed. “Children, you will be separated for the remainder of the year. Sean, you’ll be moved to another class. But for now, your mother and I believe it would help to put this bad blood behind us. Sean, would you please apologize to Harriet?”

I thought Sean would never take his eyes off his shoes, but I was wrong. He inhaled deeply, stood straight up out of his chair, looked me in the eye, and proclaimed, “Harriet Weinberg, I’m sorry I called you”—and here he slowed his pace to enunciate every syllable of the name he’d given me—“a fucking-Jewbag-baby-killer.”

When he looked at his mother, he smiled. Not an I’m-sorry-I-did-this smile filled with the relief one feels after owning up to a giant mistake, but a smile that said to the room, “I did it. I said it again. Out loud. In front of adults.”

The corners of Mrs. Franklin’s mouth turned up, and not in an I’m-so-proud-of-you-for-apologizing way, but in a way that said, “You did it. You said it again. Out loud. With my blessing.” With. My. Blessing.

I looked at the principal whose fingers were rubbing his brow. “Harriet, I believe we’re done here. You may go back to class,” which I did, but not before I heard him compliment Mrs. Franklin on her sense of optics.

At home, my parents were relieved to hear that Mrs. Franklin had made Sean apologize and that the principal facilitated such an important gesture. I was afraid to talk about what I felt—what I knew—had transpired between them in the office, so I let it be.

*

Important facts about my father, Reuben Weinberg: He was born in Germany in 1930. He learned to play the mandolin when he was six years old, and to this day, he believes that his musicianship saved his life at Buchenwald, where he played for Nazi officers during their elite dinners. He was liberated by Americans in April 1945, men he referred to as Top-notch Heroes.

Beyond that, my father never discussed his childhood—other than to say that his mother Rivkah and his father Harold, for whom I’m named, were loving parents to him and his three siblings, all of whom he lost in the war—and he never ever mentioned his experience in the camp. My mother had told me about the mandolin.

My parents met at the racetrack in Saratoga in 1955. She was a cashier putting herself through graduate school, and he played mandolin for tips outside the gate. They fell in love with the same horse—a three-year-old chestnut mare named American Fantasy—and visited her after each race. My mother claimed that the horse had to be Jewish because she loved when my father sat on the hay bale outside her stall and played Hatikvah for her.

Among those in attendance at my parents’ wedding were the three American soldiers who had put my father in their truck at Buchenwald, who, upon learning that his entire family had been exterminated, arranged for his transport to the United States, placed him in the care of a foster family in upstate New York, and over the years, sent numerous postcards which remained bundled in a secret box until my father died on his eighty-sixth birthday. His foster parents, Irene and Albert O’Sullivan, along with those three soldiers, walked my father down the aisle and stood with him under the chuppah. Later that evening, they gave my parents the deed to a small parcel of farmland outside of Saratoga where we would someday bury a murdered eagle.

*

The mystery of the murdered eagle floated in and out of my consciousness over the years. Before his death, my father admitted to me that he believed back then that the eagle had been shot somewhere else and tossed onto our farm, impelled by deep hatred of us as Jews. But when I was a child, it was my mother who planted that notion in my brain–an idea so terrifying and so very real.

On a weekend shopping trip into town when I was in seventh grade, my mother and I stopped at the pharmacy to restock her supply of generic greeting cards which she kept on hand for every occasion: birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, and funerals (both Jewish and non-). The pharmacy had gotten a new shipment of baseball cards, and it seemed like every man who had a son was there to buy as many packs as he could fit into his pickup truck. We left with our Hallmark stash, as well as a few baseball packs for my brothers, and got into my mother’s old Cutlass. That’s when she turned to me and said, “Harriet, sometimes I think about that poor eagle, and then everyone in front of me becomes a suspect.” She added, “You do know this, right? That eagle didn’t die from someone taking aim near our house. Someone shot it and dropped it at our front door, in direct view of our mezuzah.” I didn’t ask her how she knew that for sure, but I did remember seeing some hushed conversations with the deputy.

It might have been the number of deli pickles I’d eaten the day before or perhaps the fear my mother let slip, but my stomach cramped so fiercely that I had to bring my knees to my chin so I could ride out the pain.

Sometimes, after that conversation with my mother, I lay awake at night in a sweat recovering from a recurring dream I still occasionally have: I am on the downhill of a roller coaster when the track breaks off, sending the train into a fatal plunge. Invariably, the eagle appears in the sky and explodes just before I crash, blood-tinged feathers scattering against the clouds.

Sometimes in school, when I was ahead of my math teacher in an algebraic equation or finished with my literary analysis in English, I’d have a few minutes to run down the list of suspects I’d been keeping since the eagle appeared:

The deputy. No. The night he helped us clean up the swastika, my brothers said they saw him crying at his car when he radioed in the incident. My father once referred to him as another Top-notch American Hero.

Sean Franklin. No. Even though he bragged incessantly about his parents teaching him to shoot, Vicky said she saw him taking target practice in his yard once, and he missed every time. She was sure there was no way he could hit a bird in flight, not even an eagle.

Mr. Abernathy. No. He hated all children and their parents equally.

Lyle Browman. No. Although he called Vicky and me a half-baked, rotten Oreo, he was hapless. For example, the minute he drove his brand new Mustang off the lot, a deer came out of nowhere on Route 9 and totaled the car. Also, Lyle was the only student to ever get caught cheating in Mr. Long’s French class. I mean, it’s pretty bad when you try to get answers off of the teacher’s daughter. How did he not know? It would have taken more luck to hit an eagle in flight than Lyle had in his whole life. 

Cynthia Schuller. No. A badass barrel racer who lived on a cattle ranch just north of town, she could shoot. But I once heard her say to Lyle Browman that if she stood on the other side of Vicky, we’d be a whole Oreo, just in reverse: two white cookies with a chocolate center. And then she put her hands on her hips and towered over Lyle until he shrank away.

Some other psychopath maybe, but who?

Once in a while, the image of the murdered eagle would morph into a swastika in my brain—two broken wings, a broken neck, and twisted legs. The second time that image appeared to me, I began my imaginary conversations with Mister Rogers, whom I secretly idolized, even after Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood went off the air. He said, “Oh Harry, I’m so sorry that this happened. It must be very unsettling for you and your family. You know, there will always be people who are unhappy, and sometimes they lash out at others for reasons we can’t know.” Unfortunately, Mister Rogers always stopped short of telling me what to do.

The mystery of the dead eagle had a folklore-ish quality to it, even among our town’s adults. The deputy stopped by periodically to update us on people who claimed they saw who did it. None of them ever turned out to be legitimate. Once in a while, a school secretary would ask, “Any progress on the eagle story, Harriet?” and I’d have to answer, “None. Zero. Zip.” And once at the high school talent show, my social studies teacher Mrs. Peterson did a comedy routine with her guitar and sang cutting songs about her students, ending her act with a reference to the eagle:

“And on her farm in the western part of town

Harriet Weinberg found something so regal

Don’t worry though, she won’t rest until he’s found—

The murderer of her beloved eagle!”

The audience’s response was lukewarm. Some of my classmates yelled, “Go, Harriet!” but I was distracted by Sean Franklin who had his fist over his nose, a brilliant pantomime he repeated whenever my name was mentioned.

Over the years, my parents ran into the Franklins at various school functions (pancake breakfasts, holiday food drives) and they spoke pleasantly to one another. I cringed at the way my father paraded his deep appreciation for Mrs. Franklin’s insistence on Sean’s apology, and the way Mrs. Franklin appeared to be interested in the mystery of the eagle for so long. Still, I never came clean about my own feelings about the Franklins, and I never spoke about the other incidents—the ones that by today’s standards, might have added up to a panorama of harassment. My whole childhood, my father kept the details of his past inside where they simmered in a stew of disbelief and trauma—I presume because it would have broken him to see his children confront the truth he had faced about the world, about humanity. And I kept so much from him, my valiant effort to keep his American fantasy alive, to protect him from what I already knew at a very young age.

*

On the day of our graduation from high school, Vicky snuck out of line to stand with me. My parents stood with their arms wrapped around each other and Mrs. Johnson, while my brothers snapped photographs on disposable cameras. The years leading to this moment galloped through my memory with vivid determination.

The red swastika on our garage. The eagle’s burial. The sheen of dried saliva on my brothers’ shoes. Sean Franklin’s pseudo apology. A Jewish star, drawn on fabric and ripped in half, taped to a stall in the junior high bathroom. “Kike,” whispered through a player’s angry teeth on the basketball court during gym. A magic marker rendering of Hitler’s mustache on my locker. A biology teacher’s accusation that I had cheated because, well, you know. The relentless insinuation that my parents bought my admission to Harvard.

Vicky had her own list. Gloria Fuckface and the N-word. Her mother’s inherent distrust of everyone she met. Her father’s unnecessary death, resting on the shoulders of white doctors and nurses who dismissed his chronic headaches as migraines. More of the N-word—scratched into desk surfaces and bathroom stalls, graffitied on school building bricks, and not whispered, but shouted, at volleyball games and swim meets. The relentless assertion that her admission to Princeton was a mistake, that she’d be given the boot once they discovered, well, you know.

After we’d all received our diplomas, Vicky, her mother, and my family made our way to where our cars were parked side by side. Two spots down from ours, the Franklin family stood by their station wagon, facing us.

Up until this moment, I had avoided Sean like the plague. Once in English class, before I could hide from him in the honors track, our teacher grouped us together for a research project on Shakespeare’s villains. As a test of what? Time, maybe? I asked him to look up Shylock. He smiled that evil smile of his and said, “I know who Shylock is. Of course I do.” Of course he did.

Graduates and their families were boisterous around us, and I so wanted to leave, to have dinner with Vicky and her mom and my family. But something made me look over at Sean’s mother who was guiding her younger children into their car. She had gotten a little dowdy since our meeting at the elementary school, but I could see her signature blue eye shadow. She caught me staring at her and stared back, challenging me to a silent conversation with our eyes. The surrounding noise—grandparents checking with parents about directions to the restaurants, pre-teens whining about having to keep their nice clothes on—disappeared so that all I heard was a pulse in my head, the kind of pulse that begs you to pay attention to whatever is about to happen. And then it happened. With no words spoken, Mrs. Franklin delivered the final lesson of my childhood education.

With one hand in finger-gun position, Mrs. Franklin pointed to her car’s bumper sticker. An eagle, mid-flight.

My father saw it. I knew from the movement in his jaw, from the way he touched his sport coat on the spot where just two hours earlier, he’d placed his hand and recited the Pledge along with two hundred graduates and their families.

And there it was. The thing that could no longer be hidden, that could not be denied. The thing that could be powder blue, ironed, maternal. That could smile at you from across an office. That could twist a school principal into compliance, convince once level-headed adults that “kids are just kids” and a little spit on a sneaker doesn’t mean anything. The thing that could read Shakespeare, for fuck’s sake. That could be pleasant in a way that makes someone feel crazy for doubting the pleasantness, like a camp guard who holds a door, appearing almost respectful, while his fellow officer ushers prisoners into the chamber. The thing that, with unabashed pride and aggressive righteousness, not only could, but would, revive a survivor’s doubts about freedom, about democracy, about the future.

I went to where my father was standing wordless, and I put my arms around his neck, my head on his shoulder. But his embrace was stiff, the heart of him already broken.