The Man Who Loved Birds by Fenton Johnson

had consequences, he made decisions—he had decided that under no circumstances would he allow himself to be hauled off to an illegal war, he had decided to join a monastery. Now, years into the job and it had become mere employment instead of a way of life, a job in which the never-completed list of things to be done took on a life of its own, the mornings flew past and then it was the midday hour, then there was dinner, then a nap, then two hours of prayer and meditation that had become a daily indulgence in guilt and self-recrimination. Then the evening services, with their formulaic predictability—years into their chanting and he was over and done with the psalms, way over and done with the psalms. What was the point of all this ritual anyway?
    At the fork to the statues his feet took him to the left, deeper into the forest. He let them take turns of their own devising untilhe found himself facing the wall of cedars through which he’d pushed to encounter Johnny Faye and his dog JC. Over the beating of his heart he could hear the chup and thunk of a hoe.
    Flavian hesitated for a moment—nothing but trouble on the other side of those cedars. But he was here and Johnny Faye was here and this time he could find out where he lived and then he could return the envelope. The man was on monastery property and Flavian had a responsibility at least to see what he was up to, or so he told himself as he set about finding the parting in the cedars that opened onto the bend in the creek.
    But now the trees were so dense that he was scratched and bleeding by the time he shoved through them to reach the lip of the bluff. From there he caught a glimpse of a straw hat and the familiar torn white singlet, but then his boot hit a patch of slick mud and he was down, sliding like a sled over the creek bank clay to land with his boots ankle-deep in water and the vegetable patch right in front of his eyes, the corn already sprouting its spring-green leaves and Johnny Faye nowhere to be seen. He had been there and now he wasn’t, a conjuring trick if ever Flavian had seen one, so remarkable that Flavian shook his head and rubbed his eyes, and when he opened them there was Johnny Faye.
    “I was shared skitless. I thought you was Officer Smith or the like coming to haul me off to the pen and the crop barely in the ground.”
    “Scared? What for?”
    “Next time you sneak up on me, give me a little warning.” Johnny Faye pursed his lips and cooed. “
Ooo-aahh, ooo, ooo, ooo
. Like a mourning dove.”
    “Well, whatever you say, but you don’t often see doves down in a creek bed.”
    “You’re a bright boy, Brother Tom, even if you are a dumbass. That’s the point.
You
know that and
I
know that but most people wouldn’t give it a second thought. So when I’m down here and I hear a dove calling I’ll know it’s you.”
    “Well, OK, but why all this cloak-and-dagger stuff over a patch of vegetables?”
    Johnny Faye rolled his eyes and knelt to his task. He was weeding with a trowel. For a few minutes he worked in silence. Flavian located the white-and-tan sycamore throne and was about to take his seat when Johnny Faye straightened and stretched. “Against your religion to work on Sunday?”
    “Well, yes, actually, except in cases of dire necessity.”
    Johnny Faye tossed Flavian the trowel and sure enough he caught it. “If I don’t get these weeds out, the next time I’m down here they’ll be choking my—
vegetables
, and I won’t be able to pull up the weeds without taking the
vegetables
along with them. I’d call that dire necessity. Stay away from the seedlings—you can tell them easy enough—they’re the ones lined up between the corn and with the little mound of dirt around their stems. Another week and they won’t need a thing, but transplanting is hard on a plant and a person both, least until they get theirselves rooted.”
    Flavian knelt to the dirt and worked his way down the row—weeding the corn plants was