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The thing about owls is they ain’t as clever as everyone thinks they are. They don’t have the brains for it. Eyes that big in a head that small, something’s gotta give, and that something’s the mind powering the creature.
The birds are the laziest bastards you’ve ever met, besides. You get an owl in your tree and that owl’s gonna be in your tree until the pickings get slim. It sits and waits until some fool vermin sneaks through the underbrush over and around the tree’s roots, and that’s when the bird goes vicious — uses all the energy it’s got banked to strike out and secure its dinner. Then it goes back to sitting, smug as you please.
There’d been an owl nest in the big magnolia tree next to the back porch of the big house. Mice had set up a real buffet for themselves, easy access to the kitchens and the storm cellar, and the cats that roamed the plantation had their bellies full with what they caught in the fields. When that owl had settled in, cook had crossed herself and kissed her fingers, sincere genuflection.
That owl barely took a shit its first week of residence, but it was with the sinking sun one evening that Goodnight watched that damned bird shoot like hell from a gun, snarling a screeching mouse in its talons before alighting back on its branch like nothing to it. It gulped down the mouse in the space of a few heaving seconds, and then it rustled its feathers and resettled down to nap.
There were books in the library, meticulous diagrams of mammalian and avian anatomy, and Goodnight had run his fingers over a picture of an owl skull, wide empty eye sockets and a teaspoon of a brain cavity, and thought that a lazy and stupid bird like that was smart in all the Goddamn ways it needed to be.
==
Man of his import and education, he mayhap could’ve been an officer. He wasn’t anyone special beyond where and what he came from though, and when he split a strawman’s head from its shoulders with one bullet after the next, it was an easy path to walk to end up with a sharpshooter battalion, ready and eager to take aim at every Yank who dared cross the border.
There was a steadiness to it, paired with the strange rush of the wait, wait, wait — your heart drumming music in your ears, the song quickening the blood in your veins — until a body focused in your sights, until your aim was true.
His aim was frequently true, his rifle an extension of his arms, his hands, his eyes. The men he stood with named theirs, a girl back at home or an imagined beauty, and Goodnight thought of that damned bird outside of the big house and carved ibou-la into the butt of his Whitworth: the owl, as his governess had taught him.
No owl took to wing without a target. No owl would court starvation and return to roost empty-clawed. The owl would bide its time, until the opportunity presented itself.
Stay silent. Stay still. Breathe. Wait. Strike.
==
There is war, and there is war, and there is war, and then there is a brisk Maryland dawn in September, and the following long, abrasive day.
Goodnight is no faint of heart, no stranger to death. He has aimed and he has fired, and he has taken down what were surely good men, same as he’d watched fall on his side.
But in Sharpsburg there is blood on his hands, real blood, no metaphor to pretty up his words. Blood from Johnny Wilcox who called himself Johnny Reb with a resiliency unknown to man before his creation; blood from the wound leeching out Goodnight’s own very life in his side; blood from the Yank who’d gotten too close, eyes too white in his face, teeth bared like one of the devil’s hounds.
There’s artillery in Sharpsburg. Goodnight’s ears ring with the cacophony of cannon song. He feels the beat of it in his chest, behind his eyes, and he waits, he waits, he waits, until he can strike.
Preserve your energy, don’t expose yourself, wait, wait, wait.
Strike like hell from a gun.
The day stretches into the eternities until Burnside draws his men back to the west bank of the Antietam. Goodnight stays by his gun until the fires are lit, watching for — something. Movement near the bridge over the river. Movement closer to his perch.
His hands hold themselves curled when he withdraws. There’s a pain to walking, a pull in his spine to lean over his rifle, as though there’s comfort to be found there. There are murmurs around the camp, one of the men in his battalion — his name, it slips through Goodnight’s fingers, his mind’s gone from him — breathing out a number, followed by a firm clasp of Goodnight’s shoulder.
There’s food, several mouthfuls of shit, that he has no appetite for. He sits in the dirt, his rifle next to him. He runs his thumb over the carved name. Owls are clever. They do what they must, to survive.
There’s blood under his nails. He doesn’t know whose blood it is.
He will never be hungry again.
==
He stays alive after Sharpsburg through the mercy of God the father and Christ almighty, or because they’ve got a wicked sense of humor about them. He stays alive, and he’s useless with a gun after a week. He’s not a deserter, but there are concessions to be made for a good ol’ boy who took out twenty-three sons of bitches with his vicious bird. He’s a mouth to feed with no bullets in his gun to show for it, and he finds more than takes an out.
More often than not he dreams of an owl, perched in the ever-stretching branches of a magnolia tree, waiting out its prey. Its eyes pierce into Goodnight’s very soul. He feels drawn to it at the same time he knows it’s a killer. He feels a kinship to that bird. That damned owl.
There’s a darkness to the those years that Goodnight can’t pierce with one of Billy’s pretty hairpins.
Sam Chisholm, a good man, who finds Goodnight ass over teakettle just outside of Virginia, endures the betrothal portion of Goodnight’s courting of sweet lady liquor, by which point Goodnight has found he finds some measure of peace when he upends glass after glass after glass and loses consciousness more than sleeps.
“The mercy of a Union soldier,” Goodnight drawls, head tilted over the side of his cot, while Sam readies himself for what sleep he’ll get, sharing air with a bastard rebel who may or may not awake him hollering like a child.
“Or something like it,” Sam replies, and Goodnight laughs through the spit welling in the back of his throat, the angle adding difficulty to swallowing.
Sam Chisholm, unable to take even a drunken compliment from the mouth of a real sonuvabitch.
“Aw shit,” Goodnight says, aware of the melancholy even as it settles on him like fog on the field. Sam Chisholm, who sees in Goodnight something worth preserving; who doesn’t equate what a man’s done with who he is, a charge that could not be made of Goodnight himself.
“Get in bed before you choke yourself,” Sam says, and Goodnight does.
Sam doesn’t give Goodnight a single lonely concession. He’s a straightforward sort, not interested in the verbal tapestries Goodnight perfected in school, though ever and anon Goodnight catches the curve of a smile on his face.
Sam Chisholm saves his Goddamn life.
Sam knows about the owl, and about Sparksburg — “Antietam,” he corrects, and Goodnight dismisses his northern sensibilities — and Sam keeps Goodnight from choking on his own bile. He waits out Goodnight’s crooked attitudes, and clocks him solidly in the jaw when his liquor-loosened tongue strays too far southern.
“I am better having known you,” Goodnight tells him when they part in Missouri, and Sam shakes his head slow, as though he’s not grown accustomed to Goodnight’s whole self.
“And you’ll keep being,” Sam replies, a double meaning not lost on Goodnight: instruction to continue forward, and to continue in and of itself.
Billy Rocks is not at first glance the good man Goodnight recognized in Sam Chisholm. He has the same brand of mercy though, a hesitancy to dismiss Goodnight for the miserable fucker he knows himself to be. He has something to offer Billy though, what he could never offer Sam — the ease with which he navigates conversations with the salt of the earth, charming suspicious folk into live and let living. That tit for tat helps with the emotions that inevitably come, when Goodnight catches up with himself, remembering who he is.
Billy’s at Goodnight’s elbow when he shakes awake, the owl having found a friend, trees and trees and low calls echoing throughout, talons finding tender flesh. Goodnight can’t string together the words to explain, pride warring with itself, his comfort with language and his want for this man to believe him to be someone greater than who he so clearly is.
“You ever kill somebody who didn’t deserve it?” he asks Billy, throat raw from the parchedness of the desert. From the way he must’ve hollered at the devil in his sleep.
Billy’s slow to talk. It’s no reflection of his English; just a man contented to let others assume his failings, and reluctant to correct them. Not to say he isn’t thoughtful: he’d let Goodnight stew in his own juices before speaking out of turn.
“May have. But they were trying to kill me at the time.” Billy passes Goodnight the flask they share, Goodnight’s flask, full of bitter whiskey they’d gotten for cheap in El Paso.
Goodnight closes his hand over Billy’s and tips the whiskey into the dirt. “We need to reorient our priorities. I’m not getting drunk off of something not worth the wood it aged in.”
Billy laughs, voice heavy with lack of sleep, but he stays up with Goodnight the entire Goddamn night, and doesn’t broach any topic Goodnight doesn’t bring up himself.
==
“You ever watch an owl catch its meal?”
Billy scans the trees, starting with where Goodnight’s gazing.
But Goodnight’s just talking. There are no owls in the trees. No owls tonight, praise be to God.
No owls tonight.