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So spake the Fiend, and with necessity,

The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds.

_________

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV

Pretty-pretty! Weep-weep-weep-weep-weep-weep-weep.

The Cardinals were singing, the first day of August.

The heat had gotten to Archibald Lightfoot, so he sat in his 560SL with the air conditioning running, staring at his house.

It was late Summer with its strange slanted sunlight between the dappling of the hickory leaves, late Summer with its languid promises and its hushed stillness, late Summer with passions left unfilled. The glitter and glamor of the beaches and waterfronts are behind you: ahead lies languor, color, Fall.

It was the day after his son, Stephen had left for college – Eckerd, in Saint Petersburg, Florida. His first choice was Virginia Tech, but he said he wanted to go to Florida, just like his other son – his other son, Andrew – and he could refuse him nothing, and so he didn't, and so off he went.

His wife, soon to be his ex-wife although the papers hadn't caught it yet, was gone, so the house – the Lightfoot Manse, Edgecrestwood, NRHP reference number 66000-something-or-other – was his, his alone.

Historical house, full of history – his great-grandfather had dueled a man in the foyer, so the legend went, and three slaves were crushed to death building one of the wings a century-and-a-half before that, their faces mashed in from falling bricks. They slept now where the biggest hickories – three of them – grew taller and stronger than the rest.

To witness history was to watch people die.

He glanced to the steering wheel – the Mercedes logo, quick and sharp and deadly, three blades to cut, three knives to strike.

It was his chosen brand – marque, he'd say, if he was in more polite company – of automobile, because there was something vicious and big and imperial about them, the way they escorted Hitler and then after Hitler, Honecker, the glamorous impregnability of undying totalitarianism thrusting forward with its grinning chrome grille.

…with the air conditioning on, full blast.

Late Summer – it was hot.

The heat had gotten to him.

Someone, once, had the audacity to ask him why he hated hot weather, why he always went somewhere colder when the Summer came – he'd make some joke, some deflection, it was what he was good at, it was why his marriage fell apart – because the truth was darker, stupider, than some stranger deserved.

When he was a lad, his father, Ironside Lightfoot, president of the West Virginia senate, was invited to see the President in Dallas, they were going to talk over something with Governor Connolly, some connection between West Virginia and Texas.

And, there, he'd seen John Fitzgerald Kennedy, smiling, waving, well, Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you!

He saw the man's head explode.

He'd seen the scarlet mist, he'd seen the First Lady crawl out over the trunk.

To witness history was to watch people die.

Wide-eyed little Archie, who wanted to be like President Kennedy, who wanted to be like Ironside Lightfoot and help people everywhere he could – the boy who would grow up to smile into his chardonnay as he read the newspaper reports of one of his enemies being ruined forever, the boy who would see the drowned body of a wrinkled, bloated old associate of his father's who diddled little boys in his spare time and couldn't help but sigh with relief – was ruined that day, drowned in the blood of a president…

…when his father took him back two years later, they happened to pass Dealey Plaza, and little Archie was thrown back there, that November day, except now it was July and it was scorching, and his post-traumatic memories of the president's brains painting the First Lady's little pink dress seared itself in his mind forever, baked-on by the heat – hot weather, blood, personal tragedy, national tragedy, it was too much, it was all too much, he starting sobbing and then heaving, and then with one gigantic gulp he puked in his father's friend's Imperial and ever after he could not abide it, the heat, heat to raise the heartbeat, the heart that he grew up never to have.

For Archibald Lightfoot's heart was forever broken – and try as he may, Archibald could not fix his own heart, shattered hands cannot repair shattered things.

Now…

Now there was a latent worry he'd have to go to Stephen's graduation and bake in that awful tropical stew that his friends who knew better said covered Saint Pete like a poisoned sauna, but now, his life as it was, a spread of endless ruins inside his own head, he couldn't even think he'd make it that far – that, with any luck, the Sun would explode and vaporize him, the heat would win at last.

All day, he had tried to ignore them on the way home that day – the birds, the redbirds, the cardinals.

And the way they sang at each other, laughing, chatting, talking.

How had his father died, again?

Pretty-pretty! Weep-weep-weep-weep-weep-weep-weep.

Archibald knew – few did, few actually saw what happened, but Archibald knew.

Ironside had heard the birds.

By that time he was in a wheelchair, like his other ancestor had been, his mind was dulled but he could remember and recognize – it unnerved Archibald to see his father like that, how he was so unafraid of death, how he was dauntless against the specter of the Devil taking him by the hand and leading him down, down, to meet those who came before, to dance in the flames in the fiery cavern that Nicky Lightfoot, first amongst them to go mad in the wilderness, had prepared for them.

But first – he heard them.

The wrist his son, Archibald, wore his watch on – time, ticking away, how cliché, he went to Yale for God's sake, he could do a better metaphor than that – seized up because he remembered how his father had grabbed it, clutched it hard:

"Boy, boy! Ya hear em – em redbirds a'callin!"

Sandoro had told him that it was coming for him, it would come for Stephen, and he thought he had time, he always thought he had time before Maggie left, so that today – today—

Pretty-pretty! Weep-weep-weep-weep-weep-weep-weep.

"Birds," he heard himself mutter. "Cardinals…"

Avians prefigured too much in the worlds of the male Lightfoots, stamped from birth, absolutely literally, with their escutcheon, a cardinal displayed proper atop a mountaintop vert, below it the motto, Non Serviam, because they never would do anything but for themselves.

When Archibald was sent to military school at Linsly, the fathers of the other kids knew his father and remembered him, Archibald, the little dauphin whose poise and quiet and apathy always gave him that regal look of wanting to be anywhere but where he was right then. And these men, genteel crooks and earnestly sycophantic businessmen and small-time politicians who lied to the folk in the holler to get their votes, they all clapped him on the shoulder, the stench of Scotch and cigars and stale cologne stifling, in their mouths the same word, over, over, over: "Archieboy! Archieboy! Archieboy!"

One of them was Alexander Parker VI, of the line of the Parkers of Parkersburg, whose son, a tall boisterous thug of a boy, Alexander VII, took an instant hate to Archibald for no real reason other than adolescent sociopathy.

It seemed that every family in West Virginia, no matter from whence their forebears came, had one song, one tune at least, that was theirs ancestrally for them to claim – even amongst the meth labs in the coalfields could an addled junkie recall how to beg Pretty Polly not to take him unkind, because his long-dead papaw had taught it to him.

And so it was with Parker, whose most distant people before they claimed the toponym for a whole damn town, back across the Atlantic and back across the millennia, threw criminals into bogs under the poisonous shade of the yew-tree. Part of his family's sizable inheritance was "The Cutty-Wren," which he used to torment Archibald when they were all but eleven years old.

Parker knew who Lightfoot was, who his father was, his grandfather too, and it must have electrified the flowing testosterone of his monstrous pubescence how apropos it was, the violent imagery of the King of Birds shot through with arrows, the common folk coming for the crowned ones in revolution and revenge – it must have given him a thrill that bordered on the sexual to scream it at little Archie, what John the Red Nose said what Milder and Moulder would do to him, the small wren, the crowned king, richest amongst them, letting Wat Tyler's seven centuries of proletarian resentment traumatize Archie Lightfoot for life as the words were shouted in his ear, pressed up helplessly against a locker or a water fountain.

Archibald blinked.

And now the August sunlight, the heaving air conditioning, the patient rattle of the diesel in his 300D, they all snapped into focus, the painful flashback was over.

He ripped the keys out of the ignition, indignant, pissed off at the past, all of it, all four hundred years inside him, history that refused to die.

…as the car engine stopped and the chill gust of the AC ceased, what should appear, what should alight on his rearview mirror, but a little redbird, with his proud upright crest, his tasteful black mask.

Pretty-pretty!

Archibald stared at it in something between disgust and terror – this beautiful bird, this little Appalachian angel – he wanted to kill it, he wanted to stab and pluck it and tell it that he would not falter, not like his father, not like his grandfather…

…his eyes came down to his keys.

There was a fine pocket knife attached to his keychain, beat up in places from being there for so many years, but he refused to take it off – Junior had given it to him, before he died, he'd given it to him and it was all Archibald had of the best, maybe the only friend he'd ever had.

It had occurred to him, at Junior and Susan Anne's funeral – the only time after his son Stephen was born that he was really overcome and wept in public – that in West Virginia you never really are able to change how and where you were born, and so Junior would always be that poor boy up the mountain, and Archibald Alexander would be always Archieboy, even though Junior, who used to have to make his own clothes, grew up to afford bespoke clothing and had died in a brand new Cadillac…and even though Archibald would grow up to wear the whole world on his face, and slump into his chair night after night with the barrel of his father's revolver pointed at his eye, daring himself to shoot…

His eyes came up to the windshield.

He did not like thinking about his first son, the one he – well, no use going over it again, Maggie was divorcing him and she should have done it back then, so, oh well. But Andrew – Andrew was best friends, inseparable, with Junior's son, Bligh.

They had what Archibald and Junior had.

He'd intimated a few times that's how it had been, but he didn't think either of them truly knew, really knew – not even after Andrew left, and Stephen did the same thing.

Did that boy of Junior's, Bligh – did he know what Stephen had? The same thing Archibald had – he dreaded what was awaiting his precious boy.

He took the pocket knife and cocked back the blade – lifted up the whole thing and stabbed himself in the arm.

"Damn!" he cried aloud.

Blood welled up from his flesh – a big gush, at first, only at first…but then, slowly, it ebbed, then ceased.

And Archibald took his finger to the wound had been – where he'd deliberately hurt himself, there now was no trace.

The skin had seamlessly healed itself, just like he knew it would.

The smear of gore – red, scarlet, like a Cardinal's feather – he wiped away with one hand, opening the car door with other.

To witness history was to watch people die – and not a single male Lightfoot had died naturally.

And as he emerged, as he paced wearily with his briefcase and the August warmth creeping up upon him, unwelcome, he heard it again, louder than last time, amidst the faint, gentle flutter of their wings:

Pretty-pretty! Weep-weep-weep-weep-weep-weep-weep.