WE buried it on a weekday. It was July and from the heat of the early morning sun we could tell it was going to be another hot day. The initial excitement of summer had worn off but we were thankful not to be in school. “Just three days”, I told my audience, “three days and the bird will be in heaven.” I paused for dramatic effect then continued, “just like Jesus.” My brother nodded in agreement.
Stephen and I were raised as Catholics and as children had a particular certainty of belief that comes without question. Blind faith I think it’s called. If our parents had been Hindu we probably would have been out to demonstrate that the bird was going to be reincarnated. Of course that would have been much harder to prove. Would the bird come back as a toad? A grasshopper? A snail? And how would we recognize it in its new form? Would it give us a signal? It seemed unlikely. In that case our pagan neighbours, Victor and Craig, would have had to take our word for it. And that would not have been enough to make them believers.
The bird may or may not have been a robin, I don’t remember. But I do recall that it was the neighbours’ cat that had killed it. Charlie was lazy to be sure but every once in a while he’d surrender to his instincts and hunt down a mouse or an unsuspecting bird. More often than not he’d dispose of the carcass on our back step. This was probably because we indulged him with Kraft cheese slices and saucers of milk. My brother and I loved Charlie the way kids typically love a pet that’s not their own. We got to play with him and feed him without the inconvenience associated with having to actually provide shelter, take him to the vet or clean his litter box.
Summer nights after we’d had our baths and put on a fresh pair of pajamas you could find Stephen and I settled in front of the TV until bedtime. One of us ferociously guarding the channel changer lest the other dare switch it from the show we had chosen. Charlie would sit with us too, albeit on the opposite side of the sliding screen door. He spent most summer evenings there napping or rubbing his long somewhat overweight body up against the screen. He looked like the cat from the Meow Mix commercials or at the very least like a close relative of the star, a first cousin perhaps.
It’s not that we didn’t have pets of our own. We did—department store goldfish. We were lucky in that they lived for a very long time. And for roughly eleven years less the first month or so, it was our Dad who ended up taking care of them. The novelty of feeding the fish and outfitting their tank with new toys and coloured gravel quickly wore thin. They also happened to reside in a tank that became so consumed by algae that fish viewing was severely restricted. But even when you could see Jaws I and Jaws II, it was a limited kind of fun at best. I’m sure that was just fine with our parents; limited fun means a fairly limited amount of trouble where kids and animals are concerned.
The fact that Charlie spent a lot of time with my brother and I didn’t bother Victor and Craig. They loved him as much as kids can love a pet of their own. Once they got used to having him around they took him a bit for granted. But that didn’t mean they loved him any less. Besides without Charlie’s trophy kill we wouldn’t have had a reason to set out on our religious crusade along Deerpark Avenue.
Our neighbours attended the same Catholic school as Stephen and I but were not Catholics. I suppose somehow I felt it was my duty to ensure they had a clear understanding on the subjects of death and resurrection in so far as I understood them. Death. That was easy to grasp. The four of us regularly took the lives of small and even medium-sized insects. But death was not permanent. The deceased simply went to sleep for three days and voila, resurrection and eternal life. That was the only part of being Catholic, it seemed to me, to be worth the trouble. Everything else was kind of a drag. Giving up your favourite things for Lent chief among them. I always gave up chocolate. From an adult perspective it seemed a great sacrifice for a child to make, but not having much of a sweet tooth it was really rather effortless. So to call myself a lapsed Catholic now seems a tad inaccurate as looking back I can see that I never really committed.
As a child I thought about what it must have been like for Jesus to have risen from the dead. The scene in my mind was reminiscent of something from the Flintstones; prehistoric life depicted through single-cell animation. I always imagined a huge rock magically rolling away from in front of the Lord’s tomb. A large purple dinosaur would then immediately crush the boulder to bits and Jesus would walk out of the tomb wearing a brown robe and sandals and he was of course, Caucasian. A ray of light would part the clouds and like the Death Star tractor beam, it would lock onto the Son of God and haul him up to heaven to be seated at the right hand of the Father.
Now my neighbours were taught all about the death and resurrection of Christ in school, but it wasn’t ingrained in them like it was in us churchgoers. For them religion class was like any other of the day’s lessons; less fun than gym and certainly more peculiar than grammar. Long division, proper use of apostrophes and metric conversions were likely equally as dull as the virgin birth. Though it’s probably safe to assume that in the long run math and language arts were more useful to them than reciting the beatitudes. But my mission concerned bigger things than academia; we were going to witness a miracle.
After discovering the bird carcass on our back step that morning, my brother and I called a meeting with the boys next door to decide what to do with the body. Dead things did not make me squeamish but Stephen was a different story. He was all right with the dead bird as long as he didn’t have to touch it. It was very much like fishing up at the cottage. Catching them was okay. Eating them was okay. Holding one while it struggled for its last breath was not. Gutting, scaling and filleting of said fish were also out of the question. I was made of stronger stuff. I baited my own hook, caught my own fish and, although I did not clean my catch, I enjoyed watching a living thing become dinner. My brother’s grown out of his queasiness and it’s been quite some time since I’ve had the opportunity to observe the gutting of a fish but I’m sure I’d hold up just fine. I watch a lot of CSI.
Needless to say, it was up to me to carry the dead bird down to the edge of the yard. I found a small garden tool, which would also help in digging the grave, and scooped up the bird. Down the grassy slope we went to the edge of the yard where our property ended and the field began. The field was our own personal playground and all of the houses on our side of the street backed onto it. In the summer the neighbourhood kids used it as a baseball diamond and in winter parents got together and took turns tending to the outdoor rink where we skated. The field was helpful to our plan. It meant that we didn’t have to bury the bird on our own property. Digging up carefully manicured lawns and gardens was something that I was sure, if we were caught, would require confession.
We found a spot between our two houses just off the property lines and got to work. We dug a fairly shallow grave. Not because we were lazy but because the ground was hard and it took a bit of effort to dig even a tiny hole. I used the garden tool to pick the bird up off the lawn where we laid it to rest while making its funeral arrangements. Over the open grave I carefully angled the tiny shovel and allowed the bird to roll off of the edge. As it lay there motionless we said a little prayer. An appeal to the Almighty could only help its soul go to heaven. We must have looked pious and silly. I discovered years later that those two things often went hand in hand. We covered the body with dirt and tried to make it seem as if the ground had not been disturbed. With no backyard fences we couldn’t be too careful that one of the other neighbourhood kids wouldn’t, out of curiosity, dig up our spot to see what we had been doing. We couldn’t afford to have anyone mess with the divine so we left the grave unmarked at least to the untrained and or, adult eye. If a grown up had noticed the little pile of twigs we left behind they could easily assume they had been gathered for any number of reasons that would never warrant any more explanation than it was “kid’s stuff”. And so we left the site, a bit reluctantly, knowing that Jesus or God or the Holy Spirit or whoever it was in charge of overseeing this particular part of the job, would soon be hard at work. We went on with the rest of our day, the burial slipping our minds until the chirp of a bird triggered the memory of that morning’s events.
Waiting the required three days to see if the bird had taken spiritual flight wasn’t difficult. There was something to keep our attention. It’s called TV. Our mother hated that Stephen and I could easily spend hours in front of what my dad referred to as the “idiot box”. If she had known we were planning to exhume dead animals in the back yard she may not have minded so much our dedication to Gilligan’s Island reruns.
Three days passed like it had been a three-hour tour and with our fill of Cheerios and Mighty Mouse we got ourselves ready to unbury our bird. We threw on clean shorts and tee shirts and told mom that we were going outside to play. This was the moment they, the non-believers, were going to understand what this Catholic business was all about. I knew God wouldn’t let us down because we had faith. Hopefully the fact that we brought along two people who didn’t wouldn’t jinx it.
We didn’t think any less of Victor and Craig for not going to church. In fact my brother and I were envious that they did not have to get up on Sundays and attend a gathering that, from what we could tell, didn’t get any more fun as you got older. We would have preferred to stay home and watch TV, ride our bikes or go to McDonald’s for the Big Breakfast. At least there we didn’t have to say grace. Our parents spared us that public embarrassment. Far from hardcore flag-waving Catholics, our parents were dedicated to the less well-defined points of being Catholic; schooled in the art of not-so-subtle guilt when one reveled too happily in the wages of sin and much practiced in après- funeral drinks. We didn’t toast our friend the bird. But we would have had we known the importance of raising a glass in memory of a loved one. Lemonade would have been my tipple of choice, my brother, grape soda from the Pop Shoppe.
Years later a Catholic more knowledgeable than myself informed me that the Catholic Church doesn’t believe that animals have souls. Ergo, no souls, no pet heaven. My first reaction to this revelation was denial. My goldfish Jaws I and Jaws II, along with dogs, Suzie, Pepper and Monty were in heaven. I refused to believe anything else. But it soon became obvious, in the game of “who’s a better Catholic”, that I was losing, and badly. It would have been handy to have had this bit of information the morning we went to dig up the bird.
After gathering our neighbours from next door the four of us made our way down to the field and found the burial plot. There was a sense of anticipation and anxiety from the group. No one really knew what to expect, but I did. The bird would be in heaven. Lucky little guy. I handed over the shovel and allowed Victor, the elder of my two neighbours, to do the honours.
With a certain amount of arrogance, though perfectly innocent, I believed that Victor and Craig were missing something in their lives and that I could be the one to introduce it to them. Or maybe I just wanted to prove to myself that resurrection actually happened because if it did, it gave some credibility to the hour we had to spend at St. Pius X every week. I could have been looking for some proof for myself to keep the faith. Or, and this is the most plausible explanation, I wanted to get credit for being the one to show my friends something really cool.
As Victor carefully put the tip of the shovel into the dirt I said another little prayer asking God to spare me from looking like an idiot. The bird wasn’t buried too deeply and that made the unveiling a quick one. Within seconds we had resolution. There was the bird still dead in its grave. Only now it was covered in maggots. Squeamish or not all four of us backed up from the edge of the hole. There was a resounding “ewwwww” and then quiet as we stared, unable to take our eyes off the gruesome spectacle. None of us had seen anything like it and it was frightening. We’d all have nightmares that night but even worse than a bad dream, I had been wrong. Everything I knew and trusted was bullshit. Okay maybe not everything I knew was wrong and maybe I didn’t use the word bullshit, but this thing that was such a permanent part of our lives seemed to be… crap.
It wasn’t like I lost all faith in that instant but it was the beginning of the end of my attempt to believe. If I had been a bit older I may have been upset with my parents and blamed them for my embarrassment. But parents aren’t perfect and most of what they tell you is not wrong: “Let your pizza cool it’s too hot.” “Wear a jacket or you’ll be cold.” “Don’t touch that it’s filthy.” They weren’t out to purposely deceive me with the rising from the dead story. And really that story wasn’t theirs to begin with; it belonged to the Catholic Church. If I had consulted my parents before the bird funeral my mom could have distracted my brother and I with cookies or a trip to the donut store while my dad disposed of the bird. It would have spared me the humiliation of being a know-it-all religious freak. But looking back I was just a curious kid. True humiliation is recalling how my brother and I used to play communion with potato chips whenever we had a babysitter. There is no coming to grips with that memory.
The interesting thing about our religious experiment was that no one seemed all that surprised by the outcome. The maggots were the most shocking thing about the morning and by lunch we were on to other adventures. We often headed out to Turtles Pond, just beyond the field to catch sunfish and make a home for them in our bait bucket. They usually didn’t fare too well and after a day or so we’d find the fish floating belly-up. Staring down into the pond water there was no element of the spiritual or divine. Nor was there anything holy about a maggoty bird carcass. Death I decided was cold and harsh and without dignity. That summer passed and besides our friend the bird various sunfish, praying mantis and long-legged spiders had occasion to die at our hands, but I can honestly say that I don’t remember what we did with the bodies. Curious that.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kimberley Gillis has been writing for much longer than she’s been paid to do so (the last 15 years). She is the author of several short stories, screenplays and ads of various types. She currently lives in Toronto.
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LF #001 © Kimberley Gillis. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, October 2011.
