My father drove us to a job location in Trego County, Kansas. It was fall and the wheat was cut and the corn was brown and stiff and ready to be harvested. There was a lot of loose seed on the ground all over, which is what hunters count on during pheasant season. Alongside the road, pickups were pulled onto the shoulder where tall ochre grasses lapped at the asphalt. Hunters walked the fields in blaze orange. The colors do nothing to rouse my soul, yet I feel drawn to them out of habit of memory.
The job was a pump jack that needed its electrical system changed. It was early, and the warmth of the truck kept me in a groggy state. The highway’s micro vibrations had a way of rubbing my whole body into a rhythm that seems to massage the ears and stroke the heart.
From the corner of my eye I caught the dark slash an instant before it hit us. From the tall grass of the ditch shot a pheasant like a streak of grease on my jeans, bright brown against rust yellow fields of corn. The teal of the head, the white and red near the neck, the color in the fletching of the tail were a blur. It fired like a weapon from the grasses and smacked the passenger side door making a sound like the cavitation of a ship’s hull.
What we saw behind us was a chaos cloud contained in one small floating archipelago of feathers, swirling like a tornado from the stream of air behind the truck. The teal suddenly shone from the weak dawn light behind us. Some of the feathers seemed to rise further and further, almost a column before the movement stopped and the feathers and what must have been small parts of the body began to fall in the way that lighter-than-air things do. I thought it might be one of the most beautiful, unexplainable things I’d ever seen.
Dad muttered holy shit, slowed down, and pulled alongside the highway. The miasma of feathers was more than a quarter of a mile behind us, and once we stopped I opened the passenger door and found the small dent, hardly noticeable in the darkness of the paint.
The pheasant was flying toward or away from home. How exhilarating it must be to fire from the ground in a singular line. It is an intensity on the border of out of control, reckless. I’ve always thought it takes a recklessness for something beautiful to exist. A star. A bouquet. A well-prepared meal. I read that red paint was once a mashing of bugs, that brown was primarily a variation on dark orange, made from carotene. Insect and vegetable. In my regret, I would reassemble that long ago pheasant on canvas, using dramatic, exaggerated lines. Harness the power of only the brightest colors.
I’m sorry for a lot of things. For the serendipity of that place at that time. That instantaneous death. I’m sorry I wanted to go home. I’m sorry for my awe. I’m so sorry for my awe.
Dustin Parsons is the author of the collection Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, With Diagrams. He teaches creative writing at the University of Mississippi, where he is the director of the BFA program.
Photo by Evgeniyqw, courtesy Shutterstock.
