Help for the Haunted by John Searles Page B

the seasons. Those birdhouses, those binoculars, were the loveliest pieces of her childhood, my mother told Heekin during their interview, but they also exacerbated the heartbreak she felt after her father was gone.
    Here, too, he allowed my mother to speak for herself. As I read her words, I couldn’t help feeling that in some way she was there with me in the dark:
    I remember waking in the mornings to hear those birds singing outside my window—a sound that once brought me happiness but no longer. I tried closing my windows. I tried putting a pillow over my head. But still that chirping found me. Finally, there came a day when I couldn’t stand it any longer. Desperate to make their singing stop, I waited until my mother went into town then pulled the ladder from my father’s woodshed and climbed into the branches of those trees in our yard. My intention was to knock the birdhouses to the ground one by one, but typical of my father, he secured them to survive even the strongest storm, never mind an eleven-year-old girl. That’s when I had an idea. I climbed down and went to the kitchen, where I located a bag of steel wool, which my mother used to keep mice from getting into our house. I made my way back up into the trees and stuffed the entryways my father had drilled, then snapped off the perches so there was no hope of birds getting inside. Sure enough, their singing stopped, or at least I didn’t hear it so close to my bedroom window after that. Those birds moved on and took my father’s spirit with them, I believed, because that’s when Jack Peele entered the picture . . .
    Jack Peele. A man my mother never once mentioned to me, but whom my “practical, plain-speaking” grandmother had apparently married without her daughter present. One night, she simply set a third place at the dinner table and introduced him by saying, “Rose, I’d like you to meet your new daddy. Now let’s eat.” My mother expected this new daddy of hers to have the sinister qualities of a wicked stepparent in a fairy tale. But Jack pulled coins from his floppy ears. He recited the alphabet backward. He built towering card houses and let my mother blow them down. Instead of going to church, Jack lingered in his pj’s and watched cartoons, busting a gut each time the Road Runner escaped a free-falling anvil. One Sunday, they skipped cartoons and went out in the yard, where he kept spinning my mother by the arms and letting her loose into a leaf pile. When he grew dizzy, Jack lay on the grass, my mother beside him. Staring up into the branches of the trees, he asked, “What do you suppose is going on with those birdhouses?”
    Reluctantly, my mother told him about her father securing them up there, about the binoculars and the notebook and the songs that filled her with melancholy after he was gone. And then she told him about the steel wool and the snapped-off perches. Jack’s face grew serious. “What time of year did you do that, darling?”
    â€œSpring,” she answered.
    Jack stood and climbed one of the trees. He didn’t need a ladder; he was tall and lanky and moved chimplike through the branches. Slowly, his fingers tugged out the steel wool from one of the birdhouses before he peered inside, shaking his head and letting out a dive-bomb of a whistle.
    â€œWhat?” my mother asked from down on the ground. “ What? What? What? ”
    â€œNothing,” Jack told her.
    But that night, after he and my grandmother spent a long while whispering in the kitchen, they sat my mother down. In their most somber voices, they asked what had caused her to kill the baby birds inside those houses by making it so their mothers could not feed them. Horrified at the realization of what she’d done, my mother had trouble finding words. “It’s like I told Jack,” she stammered, tears leaking down her cheeks. “I did it . . . I did it