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Peck.
Peck.
Peck.
peck.
peck.
peck.
peck.
peck.
peck .
The salty tears poured into my pillow. What had I just seen?
About twenty minutes later, I heard my mother coming to
my sister to calm her down. Then, my brother. She came to me last, and set gently on the end of my bed.
I held in my sobs for a second...hoping she would think I was asleep and go away.
“What did we say about you waking us up when you have
nightmares?”
I was silent. I've never been good at holding back how I feel. My sobbing was silent, but still visible through my back. My mother
bent over and gently kissed me on the cheek.
“Sweetie, your Dad is going through a lot right now…I know
you get scared…but I need you to be brave for him right now,” she whispered into
my ear, her voice as tender and loving as silk.
I nodded. Then
asked her for a lullaby.
She stroke my hair and sang “Tura Lura Lura” to me, like she
did every night until I was ten years old. I fell asleep.
We went back to routine, but these events only got
worse. Dad continued to moan into
the night. I continued to have
trouble sleeping, though I muscled through it. And all the time, the little finch was there.
The finch started to become more and more prevalent by the
day. Always, always, always
pecking
It started to become very
obvious that it was following my father.
He would get up from the dinner table, move to the kitchen sink, and it
would follow to the adjacent window.
It would follow him to the window outside his bathroom, the window of
his bedroom, the window of the basement, even. Always pecking. Pecking. Pecking. Pecking.
Nonetheless, even after that night - we still treated the little bird as if she were routine around the house. I mean, the trauma of a nightmare passes quickly when you're that young...we just kept on living our life, and treated the bird as a strange nuisance.
At least the rest of the family did. That peck filled me with an odd dread. There was such a desperate, intense energy to the rhythm of the pecking that always caught my attention. Dad's too.
Dinner, towards the end of the summer. We were all tired, slowly munching
through our meatloaf.
She
appeared.
Pecking as we ate. Repetitively and intensely. Over.
And over.
And over.
And over.
And
over.
In rhythm.
Until, suddenly,
my father dropped his fork to the ground.
“It’s…it’s grandma”.
Instantly, the pecking stopped.
I looked up, the finch had disappeared. And from that moment
on, I never saw it again.
As it turns out, my father had been having a recurring dream
of a conversation with his grandmother. She had died about seven or eight years prior. In the dreams, they would continue their conversation from
the previous dreams – it was if as with each individual dream, he and my great
grandmother continued discussing what had been discussed before. They would
always get into a sort of disagreement.
And in the dreams…
…she was always wearing a yellow dress.
Right before the finch had started its assault on our
windows, my father has been offered a job with an Australian mining company
that would have paid him almost twice as much. He believes that Grandma came by to help him figure out what
to do, and how to help him feel confident in his decision to stay and maintain
the family dynamic we had.
There are times, when I am back home, that I believe Grandma
still haunts us. Doors slam
strangely, odd footsteps happen nearly all the time…however, she is not
malicious…she just cares. A piece
of me also thinks that the finch maybe followed and took a liking to me, because
I look so much like my father did at my age. Maybe she mistook me for him.
I sleep better when I'm at home now. The watching feelings have since subsided considerably. However, there’s still an energy in
that house…I pray that it’s the grandma that I never got to meet.
I'd like to dedicate this story, written about the spirit of my great grandmother McCaffrey, to the memory of my grandmother Esther Weis, who passed in the early morning hours of November 24th, 2012.
I pray that someday she'll come back as a bird just as beautiful to watch over me and my grandchildren.
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