Winter Birds by Jamie Langston Turner

old-fashioned way of viewing such images. Today he could have concealed his vice by the use of a computer. But for all of his brilliance, Eliot had shunned electronic advances. He had often said he preferred doing his writing the way Shakespeare had—with paper and ink. He left to me the transcribing of his handwritten pages into typed form, which I did on a typewriter, first a Remington manual and later a Smith-Corona electric. After he died, I learned to use a computer.
    And my intellectual, scholarly husband—had he never considered the likelihood that I would find these? Had he never realized that someone besides himself would someday be sorting through his personal papers in his absence? Had he never considered destroying them?
    And then it hit me: I was holding in my hands undeniable evidence not only of a corruption I had never suspected but also of a selfishness of the greatest magnitude. No doubt he must have known that someone would discover his cache someday, that very likely I—eighteen years his junior—would be the one. But he was counting on being gone in a permanent sense whenever this happened, and, as the consequences of the truth couldn’t touch him then, he had refused to surrender his immediate pleasures for a mere eventuality.

Chapter 8
    As the Gentle Rain From Heaven
    The yellow-billed cuckoo, an unoriginal songster, emits a continuous call of kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk with no variation of pitch or rhythm. Though often heard, the bird is seldom seen. It likes to conceal itself among sheltering foliage to gorge on hairy caterpillars .
    And so it was twenty-five years ago that I sat in Eliot’s study and learned why he kept his desk locked. At the age of fifty-five I was educated concerning the depths of man’s depravity. I had lived among good and evil people for all of those years, had heard profane language, had seen cruelty enacted firsthand on playgrounds, in classrooms, in homes, on street corners. I had witnessed the telling of lies, had participated in the act myself, had seen hundreds of murders and adulteries portrayed on television and movie screens, had read true and fictional accounts of theft, conspiracy, drunkenness, betrayal, brutality, shameful conduct of every stripe.
    Yet that night in Eliot’s study I felt as if a veil had parted between innocence and knowledge, as if every foul deed I had ever known before that time would have filled no more than a teacup compared to the flood that had now swept over me. I felt as a child must feel who suddenly wakes in the nighttime to sounds of his door splintering from the weight of a monster. Before the child can cry out, the door is down and the creature has leapt onto his bed and is mauling him. Overcome with fear, the child looks into the monster’s eyes and knows that death is better than living with the memory of this moment.
    But I am not a child. I would choose the monster’s eyes, the mauling, the black memories any day over death. I would fight to the end. I can sometimes keep the memories at bay by looking around me, setting my eyes on specific things far removed from Eliot’s study, remembering that many years have passed, that it is now instead of then, that I am here instead of there. I sit up now and let my eyes travel around my newly cleaned apartment, taking in the wooden blinds, the round table where Rachel serves my meals, the television, my recliner, my bed in the far corner. I see other things: a bookcase filled with books I have not read, a lamp with a red shade, an artificial fern in a yellow ceramic pot, a framed picture of a soldier saluting the American flag. They are only things. They stir nothing within my heart. They were here before I came. They will be here after I go. They have nothing to do with me.
    I see the door between my apartment and Rachel’s kitchen, the door through which I hear many things. Last night I heard Patrick read from the Bible again. It was a story about a boy’s lunch of bread and fish that