Dan OBrien - Eminent domain

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title	:	Eminent Domain
author	:	O'Brien, Dan.
publisher	:	University of Iowa Press
isbn10 | asin	:	0877451702
print isbn13	:	9780877451709
ebook isbn13	:	9781587291692
language	:	English
subject	American fiction.
publication date	:	1987
lcc	:	PS3565.B665E4 1987eb
ddc	:	813/.54
subject	:	American fiction.

Page i Eminent Domain

Page ii The Iowa Short Fiction Award Prize money for the award is provided by a grant from the Iowa Arts Council

Page iii Eminent Domain Dan O'Brien UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS IOWA CITY

Page iv University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright (c) 1987 by Dan O'Brien All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Second printing, 1988 Book and jacket design by Richard Hendel Typesetting by G&S Typesetters, Inc., Austin, Texas Printing and binding by BookCrafters, Inc., Chelsea, Michigan No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without permission in writing from the publisher. The author wishes to express his gratitude for a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship awarded him in 1982. The publication of this book is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., a federal agency. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O'Brien, Dan, 1947 Eminent domain. Contents: Winter catCowboy on the Concord BridgeSeals[etc.] I. Title. PS3565.B665E4 1987 813'.54 86-30846 ISBN 0-87745-170-2 Some of these stories have previously appeared, in a slightly altered form, in the Denver Quarterly, Four Quarters, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mid American Review, Prairie Schooner, Redbook, South Dakota Review, and Sunday Clothes.

Page v TO THE MEMORY OF WILLIAM H. O'BRIEN

Page vii Contents Winter Cat 1 Cowboy on the Concord Bridge 17 Seals 27 Eminent Domain 41 The Inheritance 53 Weightless 79 The Wild Geese 93 Strand of Wire 103 Final Touches 111 The Georgia Breeze 125

Page 1 Winter Cat

Page 3 My dad and I lived alone. I never really knew my mother. To me she was just a dark-haired lady who occasionally towered over my bed late at night. Sometimes I would hear her laugh in the next room. Sometimes I would hear her raise her voice or cry. I've never known enough about her to sort the good from the bad. The only concrete thing I ever knew about my mother is that she lived in North Dakota. Once, not long after she left, I found a map and located North Dakota. I was too young and my eyes fixed on the town of Fargo, a spot on the map far from my dad and me. We lived on the outskirts of Hector, Minnesota. My friends at school wondered what it was like to live without a mother. They wanted it to be bad. But it wasn't. My dad and I had everything we needed. We had a white house and five acres of land. Between the trees we had built the sheds and in the sheds we raised the birds. We both loved birds and from the very beginning we dreamed of turning our little five acres into a game-bird farm. My dad said that birds were the most perfect thing in nature. We wanted to have the best game-bird farm in the world. The first pair of birds that we got were pheasants. We collected the eggs and incubated them and in no time we had a hundred pheasants. Then we got bobwhite quail and partridge. We raised lots of them too. It came easy for us. We worked together and by the time I was in the seventh grade people were writing and calling us, asking how we did it. Our secret was simple. We really cared about the birds. That made them feel right and so they would breed for us. We did better than anyone. Together we did things that nobody had ever done with wild birds. The greatest thing we ever did was to raise sharp-tail grouse in captivity. You see, sharp-tail grouse are delicate, sensitive birds and are hard to keep alive. Dad called them fragile. That was his favorite word for sharp-tail grouse, fragile. He would say it like a church word, like he was talking about the world's rarest piece of glass. Fragile, as if to say it any other way could

Page 4 kill a grouse or make it disappear. He said they were more gentle than quail and pheasants, that they didn't compromise their ways as easily and that was why nobody had ever been able to raise them in captivity. I remember the first one we got. A friend brought it from the prairie somewhere. She had been shot in the wing and kept in a burlap sack for three days without food or water. She was almost dead, with the wound green and the whole bird smelling like grass clippings that have been in the sun. Even with the three days and the wound she was wild as a fresh-caught squirrel. There was blood on the wing, dried hard and dark. She came out of the sack with eyes perfectly round and so black that the light showed crystal in them. She stood for an instant, the tiny feathers on her head standing up like a little headdress. Her neck stretched out to full length as she got her bearings. Then she exploded, beating the broken wing along with the good one and only getting a foot off the ground. She made tight little flips over and over until my father caught her carefully in a towel and took her to a special darkened cage. When he came back he smiled at me. "They're so fragile," he said.

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