The Owl Feather

by D Bedell

One

The bar land was somber in the Cold Moon. Timber stood for the ax to clear in hopes of future abundance. Fields of crop stubble waited for the plow to bring seed and harvest to renew the pledge. Barren willows bent to the river in supplication to set the limit of land and water until the Spring flood came to scoff. It was a good time to be there, pure in its starkness.

Joe Dell made his way to the river to watch for ice wandering from farther North. The only ice he found was at the edges of quiet eddies, cracked windows to be avoided. The freezing rain had stopped to the relief of the ice-burdened trees. Wild rose hips glared under their frosting in the weak silver light of the sun. He braced his arm against a willow trunk and looked across the river to the Nebraska loess hills, the northwestern edge of the Missouri River Valley. The eastern edge of the valley and the Great Plains was marked by the loess hills a few miles behind him. Between them, the river had its play and men had their work.

It was a harsh land, one that broke women and made men cruel. The old and young were spared little. He was womanless and not yet cruel, but lean, muscles flat against bone from the labor of fields and timber. The valley could be good, but held its bounty close, tempting in its untilled profligacy.  

He took the makings of a cigarette, a can of Prince Albert and papers, from his coat pocket and rolled a thin smoke with gloveless hands. His box of matches had stayed dry in the rain and the first one struck. The exhaled smoke lingered blue. A handful of deer came to drink about fifty yards away. He watched them, timid in their approach, breath visible as they left the timber for the bank. If he had brought his rifle and mule he could have taken two of them for the camp. Fresh venison was always welcome; beans, cornbread, and bacon made a tiresome diet. Two quick shots from the German Mauser he had brought home from France would have done it.

Dell lived in the river camp on the bar land outside Angel City, a train depot town midway between St. Joseph and Council Bluffs along the Kansas City-St. Joseph-Council Bluffs line. The depot collected the produce of the valley for shipment and delivered the necessaries of rural life, equipment and staples. The station at Langdon four miles north did the same as did the Corning station four miles south. A few passengers made the tedious way between the railroad namesakes. He flipped the cigarette butt into the river and turned to go. The deer caught sight of his movement and bolted into the timber.

Back in camp he banked the fire in the two burner wood stove he used for cooking and heating. It was enough for his one room although he could see his breath in the morning and frost would collect on the inside of the window overlooking the porch and step. Fall timber work had provided ample wood for the Winter. In Summer, the shack would be stifling and sleep would be sweaty on his metal frame bunk. Most of the camp had stayed in during the rain, going out only to fetch wood from the communal pile Joe had built with clearing work leavings. It was his obligation to the sense of the camp that he belonged. 

He put a pan of canned beans and a pot of coffee on the stove. While he waited, he ate bully beef from the tin, spooning it quickly from Army habit. Dell had been in the Great War, enlisting for comrades and the adventure that proved a generation’s demise. It seemed like a long time since he took the oath at the Courthouse and boarded a train for Fort Leavenworth. Gone for a little more than a year, he returned in deep August when the loess dust suffocated the Bluff Road that guided the railroad in its parallel track. Summer work was mostly done and wages were slim for anything else. Clearing timber on a gang had been the only offering.

“The words meant little, but the idea was there.”

When the beans bubbled he took the pan outside to eat, leaving the coffee to boil. He washed the pan and the spoon at the hand pump between the shack and the jakes in back. With a mug of scalding coffee, he sat on the porch step to smoke. He rolled a better cigarette than at the river and drew deeply, exhaling slowly to savor the tobacco. Later, after tending the jack mule in its lean-to, he would pack a pipe and smoke over whiskey to watch the sun linger into twilight behind the Nebraska hills until the Plains beyond claimed it. He liked the Winter sky.

Two

An early waxing moon rose over the valley casting shadows with the chimney pipe smoke that paused over the camp in the windless night. An owl hooted in the timber stand at the edge of camp, its lamentations unsettling to the Otoes by tradition. He rose from the porch step.

Clear as bell, cold as hell.

Inside his shack, Joe Dell lit the oil lamp on his table. He went to his steamer trunk at the foot of his bunk and took out a jar of ‘shine. After pouring a full mug, he sat at his table to pack a  pipe and smoke. The lamp flicked shadows on the ceiling while he sipped and puffed. A cloud of fragrant smoke hung languidly. 

He had claimed the abandoned shack by occupation, a tenable circumstance in the nomadic tenor of the camp. People came and went according to means and inclination among the Otoe. Dell felt comfortable with the situation and no one called him on it. Life in the camp had simply adjusted to include him and his mule. It was a social contract that worked for the place.

The mug was empty; he filled it again and repacked his pipe. A match brought the welcome smoke to him. He sipped the whiskey and felt the familiar burn spread through him. 

Going to be a long Saturday night.

He welcomed the thought and got the YMCA pocket Bible from his trunk, intending to read some parts he did not know, which was almost all of it. The words meant little, but the idea was there. He read until the moon set across the river. His bunk made whiskey dreams when he finished with the book. He slept in his clothes.

Three

On Sunday he woke with whiskey and tobacco heavy in his mouth. He tended the stove and put coffee on to boil before he went to the jakes. He washed his mouth out at the handpump. The water was cold. On his way back, he fed and watered the mule as it stamped in the lean-to. The mule needed exercise, something he would have to do later, maybe ride into Angel City. 

Angel City had been laid out shortly after the Platte Purchase took the land from the Otoes. Six months later, Mt. Hope Cemetery was christened with its first convert, making it a settled country. The Otoes were moved to Nebraska and Kansas reservations in what was called Indian Country. A few remained in the camp, mostly those too settled or old to move. A few young people remained to care for the old ones. Others stayed because it was as good as anywhere. The Otoes had endured there long before the first board was nailed in Angel City.

After morning necessities, he poured a mug of coffee with a splash of whiskey. The day was clear and the trees were still. 

Four

The jack was frisky on the ride to Angel City, stamping the frozen ground at a quick walk, free of the lean-to in brisk air. Dell rode bareback with a rope halter, his Army greatcoat draping onto the mule. It was Sunday and the churches would be emancipating their congregations soon. Some of those confident in the Lord would go home to Sunday dinner, fried chicken or roast beef, mashed potatoes, green beans, and white or brown gravy. He would have none of that. Cornbread and coffee would be his communion. 

It all comes out the same way.

He turned the mule around at the edge of town and headed back out onto the bar to the camp. The sun did little to warm and the mule’s breath marked its path while his own trailed, ephemera to his passing. There was no one else on the bar and he let the jack have its head while he fumbled rolling a cigarette. The mule twitched when the match struck. The whiskey was still in his head and he smoked unhurriedly, content to let the sunny day take his mind. 

Dollar a day.

The mule stopped and bent its head to a clump of winter grass while it sent a steaming offering splashing to the ground. A murder of crows cawed and climbed high over the timber near the river, evidence of his invasion into their realm. Finished with the grass, the mule moved a few paces toward the sentinels before Dell put his heels into it and turned home.

Five

The cabin was cold; the fire in the stove had died to embers and he took some time to get it going for coffee. He mixed meal, egg, and water for cornbread in a cast iron skillet with a lid, a makeshift Dutch oven, setting it to cook while the coffee boiled.  Tomorrow he would be back on the timber gang, trimming limbs with a bucksaw, rolling logs with a peavey. The mule would be hitched to drag the trunks to a makeshift saw mill on the bar. Planks would be loaded onto a wagon headed for Angel City lumber yard for kilning. It was hard, gritty work that broke men in the long run, hands and muscles becoming gnarled and stiff with age. Dell looked at his hands, calloused and strong, a young man’s hands. The cornbread was done. He cut a pie slice and smeared it with a little bacon grease before he took a bite. It would do. 

A long way to go yet.

The mule was still restless in the lean-to. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and wondered if there was enough daylight to get to Angel Holler and back. The jack was skittish after sundown and Dell did not want to risk a fall in the dark. 

Should be enough.

The Otoes took their children to Angel Holler for omens. Others went, too. A Baptist preacher had gone there to cast out its unholiness and came back a very frightened man. He never said what happened, but soon after left Angel City for St. Joseph, leaving a wife and child behind to bewildered parishioners. The Otoes believed angel wings could be heard there and those who heard them would be seers of omens in life. Dell liked the place and always wondered if he would hear the wings. 

Maybe today.

He left two pieces of cornbread in the pan to have with beans for supper and went out to the lean-to. The jack took the halter easily in anticipation of freedom. He led the mule out and slid onto its back with practiced ease while pointing it east to Angel Holler across the bar. 

Six

Angel Holler was still wet and black from the freezing rain, the woods a dark stain in the bright sun. He saw a pile of small bones in the leaves beneath one of the trees. The bones were white as the moon.

Owl tree. Omen?

Joe Dell scoffed at himself and then chided his lack of commitment to the vow taken in a YMCA basement in New York just before he shipped to France. He had the Bible to prove it. Still, he thought there were many things not held in the book itself, but attached more to the land and people who walked on it. There were things in Angel Holler before Angel City and its churches, and would be long afterwards. He liked the thought, not considering it to be odd, but reassuring. The mule shied as a rabbit jumped from cover. He patted the jack’s neck and slid down to walk, letting the halter drop to anchor the animal.

“The Otoes believed angel wings could be heard there and those who heard them would be seers of omens in life.”

The winter leaves were deep and rustled crisply. He walked to the old spring house above Angel Creek, a relic of an earlier work on the land. The water was good and the mule trailed behind him. He leaned against the stone wall and looked west over the bar land while he rolled a cigarette. It was flat land with timber along the river and its tributaries. Fields were laid out in quarter sections, 160 acres, a patchwork. He exhaled a long stream of smoke.

A flash of white caught his eye and he looked up to see a great, white owl settle into a tree. A cigar box owl, odd there, usually much farther North. Dell had not seen one before in the valley or the hills. The owl looked at him and spread its large wings slowly, a harbinger to the Otoes, a curiosity to Dell. The mule shied again and he caught the halter to steady it. The owl held its span and fixed his eyes on him. 

Damn!

The owl dropped from the tree and sailed low to the ground, a single feather drifting after it, white as bone against the brown leaves. Picking up the feather, he smoothed it along the vane. He thought he knew what spooked the preacher: An omen.

Seven

Night in the camp was solitary. Beans bubbled on the stove and he crumbled one of the cornbreads into the pan with a dollop of grease. The other piece he would use to sop the juice. He poured coffee and sat at the table to eat, forgetting the blessing again. The owl had left him uneasy. He looked at the feather lying on the trunk and wondered what the Otoe would think about it. They would likely caution him or simply walk away from a bad omen, if that’s what it was. 

It’s just a feather.

A sharp cry ended in a wail. He went to the porch and looked into the twilight. The great owl was in the timber near the camp edge and had been seen by one of the older Otoe women. Doors were opened to see and closed hurriedly to prevent bad luck from entering. Joe stood on his step and watched the owl as he thought the owl watched him. The hair stood on the back of his neck. He wondered if he had erred in taking the feather.

Not just a feather.

He went inside and closed the door on the camp, the owl’s eyes talons in his back. The feather on the trunk stared at him. The ululations grated outside. The Otoes would not sleep.

Maybe that preacher was right.