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The first time Ichabod sees a starling in Sleepy Hollow, he doesn’t believe it. He’s seen monsters and demons and ghosts and witches but this? This is too much. This destroys facts, science, logic and order. Concreteness smears like wet ink across vellum and Ichabod can only stare at the small bird, hopping around in the grass on its twig-like legs, chattering merrily.
Look at the starling in the apple tree. See how its wings shine like jewels in the sunlight?
The second time Ichabod sees a starling in Sleepy Hollow, he scoffs. The incongruity of it! No starlings existed in this place in 1781, yet now, in the year of our lord 2015, they fly and cry and chirp all around him in this land that he adopted so many centuries ago.
This starling hops around on a picnic table, pecking at breadcrumbs left behind by unscrupulous park goers. The bird fluffs its wings, the light glancing off its feathers and rendering them green, red, yellow. Tiny jewels attached within its very wings.
Will you get me my gloves, Ichabod? You know where I keep them.
The third time Ichabod sees a starling in Sleepy Hollow, it is winter. Snow falls with the silence that he’s always loved: the utter quiet as the flakes whisper to earth, collecting on the ground until they swath the ground in pure white. This starling merely sits in its nest, quiet, content and surprisingly fat given the time of year.
You musn’t take your father’s words so hard. Dry your tears now, love.
When he asks Abbie about the starlings–why are they here in New York?–she just shrugs and gives the usual answer of “Google it.” So Ichabod Googles it. He discovers that in 1890, the president of the so-called American Acclimatization Society attempted to introduce every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s works to the United States. Starlings, Ichabod discovers, are one of the few birds to flourish under this ridiculous man’s meddling.
“Absurdities upon absurdities,” Ichabod mutters to himself as his gaze darts across the bright laptop screen, reading the Wikipedia article at 1:36 AM. It’s preferable to “go down this rabbit hole”—another Abbie-ism—of the Internet in the early hours of the morning than otherwise.
Otherwise, he thinks, and Ichabod doesn’t want to think right now.
*
She smelled of lemon verbena. Her hands were soft and fine, her voice a contralto, capable of soothing and sharp tones within the same moment. In her youth, people called her handsome: compact but well-featured, her eyes her point of beauty, brows like dusky wings.
But Ichabod remembered his mother’s smile most of all, when the other memories faded: a sort of twist of her mouth, as if she were trying to contain her mirth but unable to, as if she were on the verge of laughter more often than not. A smile she wore when she looked at her sons, but not a smile she wore when she looked at her husband. Ichabod noticed this distinction early on, but as was his wont, he remained silent in his father’s presence.
His father, an austere, terrifying figure of a man, his voice always sharp in reprimand when speaking with his sons—John the elder, Ichabod the younger—and while John stood straighter in their father’s presence, Ichabod shrank away, to his father’s disgust.
A milksop of a boy! Why do you coddle him?
He’s young yet. Give him time.
Ichabod, when hearing his father’s footsteps in the hallway, would clamber from the great chair upon which he sat in the library, slithering under a table until he hid himself, holding his breath as his father entered. Listening, waiting, hoping he wouldn’t be discovered, Ichabod crouched and shook until his father left—whether minutes or hours later, he would keep himself hidden.
And his mother—the scent of lemon verbena drifting after her—would come find him, leaning down to gaze at him as he crouched underneath the table. Holding out her hand, she would say, Will you come out now, my love?
And taking her soft, fine hand, he would come out into the light.
*
Ichabod watches a starling hop across the lawn. It pecks at its feathers, the sun glancing off its wings in a spray of color.
Ichabod sips his tea. He waits.
*
She loved the garden, procuring various species of roses, tending and growing them until the smell of roses could be smelled for what seemed like miles. Red, white, pink, yellow, roses of so many varieties that Ichabod never knew how his mother remembered which was which. Forgoing a hat, she would return to the house with her face aglow with freckles and that twist of a smile on her face.
Come, sit with me. Come watch the starlings with me.
Ichabod’s brother John had already left home for school, Ichabod to follow in a year or two. For now, it was just the two of them: alone in their own rose-filled world.
This spring, though, his mother seemed paler. Her face no longer dotted with freckles, her smile vanished from her mouth, she seemed to be collapsing within herself. Drawn inward, a spring tightening and tightening.
Do you see them fly about? They are hardy creatures, starlings. And they may seem plain, but in the sunlight, they glow.
Ichabod held her hand—his father could not see him, nor his brother—and shivered at the coldness of her skin. But he said nothing, merely watching the small black birds circle overhead until they drifted out of sight.
*
There are a group of starlings by the lake. Ichabod stands, hands behind his back, his posture erect as his father taught him. Stand straight and stand tall. You aren’t a sniveling milksop of a boy, but a man.
His father, Ichabod realizes with age, meant well. He meant him to steel himself against the vagaries of life, to prepare for the pitfalls, the despairs, the separations. The deaths.
“So is this your new thing? Standing in scenic locations, staring at nothing?”
Ichabod smiles—that slight twisted smile—before glancing behind him. “Are you enjoying the view, Lieutenant?”
Abbie wrinkles her nose. “Please. You wish.” She stands beside him now, so small in stature, yet so strong. She reminds him, he realizes, of soft, fine hands and laughter of centuries ago. And like that almost faded image, Abbie waits, understanding him at a level he’s not experienced in a very long time.
“I Googled them,” Ichabod begins. Abbie raises an eyebrow. “Why there are starlings here in Sleepy Hollow,” he adds. “A man by the name of Eugene Schieffelin introduced the species some 100 years after my death and subsequent burial. He desired to add all of the birds which Shakespeare named in his works to the bird populations here in the United States.”
Abbie scoffs. “And completely messed up the ecosystem, I’m sure.”
“Quite. Although starlings were one of the few species to survive and thrive.”
Abbie says nothing, but she understands. She understands the metaphor, the companionship with mere birds, and Ichabod is intensely grateful for her existence. For her friendship, for her love.
“My mother loved starlings.” Ichabod says the words suddenly, without realizing he’s saying them. And although a part of him wants to keep those words within himself, there is relief in the confession as well. An outpouring of an old, aching emotion.
Abbie remains silent, but he knows she’s listening. She’s always listening.
“She loved starlings, yet she died before her 32nd birthday. Consumption, my father said.” The words tumble out, and Ichabod does not even know what he is saying, except that the words must be exorcised until they are spent.
Abbie steps toward the lake then, her hands in her back pockets. Her hair dances in the wind. “And you loved her,” she says with a simplicity that pierces his heart.
“And I loved her.” Now Ichabod can only watch the starlings, as he blinks and breathes and his hands curl behind him into tight fists.
After a moment, he glances up, and sees Abbie, her expression gentle, her dark eyes sad. She lost her mother when young, he knows, and the kinship between them deepens. “Tell me about her?” Her voice is soft, gentle like a voice he can’t truly remember, but he recognizes those dulcet tones all the same.
“Her name was Louisa,” he says. “Louisa Charlotte Elizabeth. She loved roses. She smelled of lemon verbena. She read Robinson Crusoe so many times the pages almost crumbled. She had a temper, but never of long duration. She refused to wear a hat outside, and my aunt teased her for all of her freckles. She could ride like the devil, but stopped after my birth.”
And as he takes a breath, and as Abbie gazes at him with the openness that never fails to render him almost prostrate, as those glittering birds take flight, as his heart beats faster under the onslaught of emotion, love filling him, love and loss and a life spanning centuries, he says, “And she loved starlings.”