By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
Roads tell stories. I’ve come across the “Mule Kick That Killed Eight People” in Edgefield County. I’ve seen stores fall to arsonists along Highway 378. I’ve seen homes go dark and swallowed by vines, and I’ve seen wheelchair ramps go up as the years roll by.
I’ve glimpsed ghost bridges when winter lays the land bare. The old Hard Labor Creek Bridge, an apparition, vanishes come summer. Another revelation exposes sights, clearcutting. Driving west on Highway 378 for the 1,000th time I saw an ancient house. First time ever. It stood on red clay near Redemption Way, a lane leading to a correctional institution.
There’ll be no redemption for the old home. As its cedar shingles die, a tin roof consoles the dying shingles. A red brick chimney, long smoke free, props up the two-story home’s western side. In a window beneath a collapsed tin overhang a red curtain and red scrap of cloth hemorrhage in blood red sunlight.
West of the home, feathers black as coal on red clay. A buzzard stood by its stricken mate. Buzzards mate for life. The buzzard maintaining a vigil turned as I approached, a wary eye on me. Its mate lay on the ground, left wing broken. It would starve to death.
From my deck one afternoon I enjoyed the fragrance of a tea olive as lazily circling buzzards honed in on a house across the street. “Something’s dead.” They gave me a notion, a story about buzzards that smell death and circle victims’ homes, prophets of doom perching on roofs. Were it true, people would be aghast to see circling buzzards approach. “God save us, here come those black-feathered demons.”
That night I dreamt a dream. Some would say nightmare. Sure enough buzzards circled the homes of a neighbor soon to die. Buzzards perched on her roof after she died. My dream’s odd because these circling winged creatures have long fascinated me. As a boy I stared spellbound into the Georgia blue watching buzzards until dizziness took hold. I stared sky-high at buzzards in my days of roaming pastures. They circled into clouds so high did they fly, a vanishing.
Writers find the derided bird symbolic and thus the noble bird flew into Southern literature as well. In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy, wrote, “They climbed up through rolling grasslands where small birds shied away chittering down the wind and a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child’s toy swung on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood.”
In “Under Buzzards,” James Dickey imagined buzzards in “heavy, heavy summer … tell me black riders, tell me what I need to know about my time in the world.”
The original ornithologists, the Cherokee, saw buzzards as gods. Buzzards beat their wings in unison after the Great Flood. Their synchronous wing beats dried the mud and carved out Appalachia’s valleys and mountains.
Naysayers see the buzzard as a harbinger of ill fortune, a bird deserving pessimism, suspicion, and phobias. Fear the birds of death that perch in dead trees. Shun the birds that love dead houses and the houses of the dead. How ghastly the buzzard with its bald head devouring innards. But—
They love their mate. Devoted and protective, a touch of humanity lived in my red clay black rider.
I don’t see them in great numbers as I once did though I drove through a large wake pulling at a deer carcass along Highway 378. Their hunched black-shoulders brought shabby-dressed pallbearers to mind. I suppose my figure of speech adds to their repulsive image, but tell me, were buzzards to go extinct what would we do? The next time you see them circling, give up a prayer of thanks, for our noble black riders.