"Martin!" she'd shouted, "There's an eagle the size of a Volkswagen out here!" Then, "Omigod, the cat! Martin!"

I'd climbed the cellar stairs and stepped outside to look. The sun was shortly to begin its way down, ponderous and swollen out above the horizon. The hour seemed late for eagles (though this was only a guess: what do I know of eagles?). Still, there was the cat, shrinking towards the house, having just seen one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And there was the eagle, surveying the barley field--until the eagle's appearance, sovereign territory of the cat.

I made the rescue without circumstance, the cat happy to see me for once. All the while I had kept an eye on the large bird, who hadn't really been interested much, having earlier feasted on one of Findlay's sheep, most likely. It was a big and terrible creature, like a god swooped down to earth. Luna was upset, spluttering on about shooting it out of the tree, damn predatory fucker (the bird, that is), vainglorious totem of rotten, stinking America, why'd it choose our damn island, our damn farm. I must have looked alarmed at this talk of hers. If vampires were declared an endangered species, she demanded as she grabbed the cat, would that stop me from pounding a stake through one's heart? My experience of vampires, I said, like my experience of bald eagles, was too slight to choose a course of action on pure, indiscriminate impulse. She looked at me like I was mad.

"Who the hell are you?" she said. "Mr. Spock?"

Normally, Luna and I are pretty cozy. But the past couple months have seen a growing number of disputes, a chilling of the marriage bed. On occasion, one of us will sleep sulkily in the guest room or on the living room couch, defying all descents into the blubbering of pet names and general repentance until morning, when we are too tired to fight, when we remember that we love each other. I come down in the mornings to Luna's bare feet hanging over the arm of the sofa where she lies, her red hair piled over an oblivious dozing face. I might suck her small toes to wake her and we might make sleepy apologetic love. Or not. It might be instead that I wake from a dream, in which I've contracted a new mutant tuberculosis, to the cat--a Russian Blue named Rudy--hunkered on my chest and staring me to consciousness with eyes the size of cantaloupes. Feed me. Let me out. Clean my box. This kind of thing, the demands this animal has, makes children hard to imagine.

So when the eagle took off, my heart momentarily swelled with inadequacies, the freedom of eagles, God's tremendous beasts of the air, unfettered by terrestrial etc. The wing-span stretched to seven feet if an inch and its scaly talons would surely have sliced through the beloved cat had they got a hold of his royal highness's earthly husk. I wasn't the only one who'd hate to have had a thing like that ripping at my liver. There was a quiver of cow flesh from Findlay's back pasture when the eagle flapped by. Or so you might imagine.

"Quite a sight," I'd said to Luna. The bird beat its wings against a sky like a bloodied peach.

Luna spooned some cat food from a tin. "What's to see?" she said.

There was a moment I got it in my mind to leave her. Her vision not reconciled with my own, her dreams contrary to mine, her lack of sympathy for eagles at cross purposes with my own. (My hatred of the cat.)

And in ambivalence, I imagined my departure.

What do you take with you when abandoning a wife? Should you have a destination, or should you simply pull out onto the highway in your Datsun half-tonne and stalk the tangle of roads to sanctuary? Should you leave in the middle of the night with Luna holding onto her pillow for dear life as she sleeps, or in the morning, with a picnic lunch in the passenger seat, and Luna hurling insults and wedding gifts at you as your truck wobbles down the driveway? What will you do when your heart breaks--and it will--at the sight of her grief, her rage, her indifference, her laughter, whatever it may be? And when you reach sanctuary, if you reach it, and wonder "From what?", what then? What, you might ask, do you really care about eagles?

Originally, Luna had been a tourist. She had come shopping at the home of a potter friend of mine and arts collaborator, Perry Callaghan, who ran our crafts business from his farm. Some people considered Perry a little strange, an elfish leftover from a hippie era that had barely happened on the island, though they loved his pots, often decorated with echoes of a storybook world. He'd shown Luna how to throw a pot with his old kick wheel, the wet cylindrical vessel rising up from the fundamental lump of clay, merrily holding forth on the creationist connotations of this. Afterwards, I'd shown her the large dragon Perry and I had made and planted out on his back lawn, my metalwork frame, Perry's glazed ceramic scales, eyes, tongue. There were more abstract pieces of my own hanging on the outside walls of the barn (car-wrecks, Ma Callaghan had called them), big Kandinsky-like loops, slabs, and strips of multi-coloured steel and tin against the weather-worn grey wood. Beautiful, Luna said. And not the usual tourist fare (meaning, I presumed, the many incarnations of the freckle-faced Island heroine as coffee cup, marionette, tea cozy). She bought an Italian wine jug of Perry's and three small bird shapes I'd forged in iron, turned down our offer of a drink and climbed back into her car. Perry and I had returned to the workshop thinking little more of her.

She came again the next year, supposedly to buy one of the abstracts. They had haunted her all the way back home, she'd said mischievously. And afterwards she'd asked me out to dinner (These city women! Perry had cried with glee). We'd feasted on mussels and lobster at a wharfside restaurant and made love on the beach, fighting the night's chill of Atlantic winds on our backs. I'd run naked into the frigid ocean and come up plastered with seaweed like a drowned man returned from the dead. "I love this place," she'd said. "I don't think I want to leave." We were married within three months, the service held in Perry's backyard among the sculptures of dragons and giant fairy-tale frogs and car-wrecks.

Two years ago.

First thing I did after the eagle incident was go to Perry's. This was a precautionary move. If upon leaving my wife I'd found myself rolling into some godforsaken burg halfway across the country, suddenly figuring out it was all a horrible mistake--my own ill-conceived equivalent of a hairweave or nineteen year-old inamorata--I'd have some time explaining myself to Luna. I'd seen Perry's own marriage disintegrate helplessly over mistakes like this. And like Perry said, the problem could be me or my wife, or any number of things. It could be the foggy cerebral aftermath of a few too many paint fumes. It could be a mischief-waging tumour. Anything at all. A seismic ripple borne along from darkest childhood might eventually fuck anybody up, he reminded me. With a trial run at his place, I could camouflage everything in the last fight Luna and I had played out (flying dishware, scurrying cat). Pretend to have been drunk for three days, say, seeking commiseration from my hippie friend before sobering up enough to skulk home.

I sat at Perry's kitchen table, sipping the hot cider he'd placed in front of me and thought of Luna. When we'd married, she had given up a good job in the big city to teach at a mediocre community college, to live with me on an Island whose community some said was rapidly and uniformly dwindling to the aged and those too dumb to leave. We had moved her things twelve hundred miles. That two years later it might all have been for naught was not really thinkable.

There had been some adjustments, the city yielding to the country in her. It had taken her a year to reckon with the rural night, the absolute darkness, the possibility of animals. Even now, it seemed nothing short of a chimney fire would send her outside after dusk. She still switched on all the hall nightlights before consigning herself to a bedroom in which she felt weightless when the bedside lamp went out, as if visibility bestowed mass. Shopping was initially akin to prospecting for gold as far as she was concerned, until the proper stores were eventually found. Television was virtually non-existent ("We don't have cable out here," Perry told her, "we only got TFC." "What's that?" Luna asked hopefully. "Two fuckin' channels," he crowed.) And she had great difficulty with the church groups and petty puritanisms of some of the farm women, the "Repent!" and "Prepare to Meet Thy God!" signs along the small highways, the patriarchy of it all, she said, though soon found the Island boasted numerous feminist organizations, a lesbian publishing company, and would elect a woman to the top Island post six months after our wedding.

And naturally, at a distance from her as I now was--if only a distance of ten miles--I began missing her immediately. The smallness of her, the warmth and strength of skin. She bore my rag and bone shop scavengery with great humour. She made love with an almost frightening earnestness. She even made more money than me. She was the one who had sacrificed. I had sacrificed nothing.

"What would you do, Perry?"

"I'd count myself lucky."

"I am lucky."

"One lucky sonofabitch."

"Lately I've been feeling less lucky, more like moving to the Yukon. At times, anyway."

"Bears in the Yukon. Bears and madmen."

"I'd buy a gun."

"You, with a gun."

"Maybe I should go on a short trip. Clear my mind."

"Walkabout, like."

"In the Datsun."

"Mm-hm."

"You'd keep an eye on Luna for me? Make sure everything's all right?"

"You think Luna would still be here?"

"Would you go, Perry?"

"Nope. I would not."

"What would you do?"

"Throw pots. Reflect at the wheel."

Which is when I started to build the aviary.

Mallet flying, Luna was pounding the chicken breasts flat for the paillards with orange sauce. She had renewed an interest in cooking since leaving the city, and I was the happy recipient of an endless variety of culinary experiments. I sat at the kitchen table, sipping her homemade blueberry wine, watching the cat prowl the yard for field mice. He killed about one a day. A few weeks back he appeared on the deck with a dead partridge overwhelming his little mouth. Luna had had a fit. I had explained to her what I saw as the stupidity of local partridges, their seeming resentment of flight--toddling along in front of the half-tonne as I drove down the driveway, running from the cat, who was only too happy to try teaching them a lesson. Stupidity, Luna said, was no excuse for showing up dead on her deck. I cheered secretly for the cat that time.

While Luna mixed the marinade, she broached the subject of what she called my disenchantment. Did I not love her? Was there some slut on the side? Had I succumbed to the selfish immature rutting that was the wont of shitheads like me the world round? Other like-minded rhetoric. Soon she was crying, the tears mingling with the orange juice concentrate and brandy. I reached my hand out from the kitchen table to open air, Luna with her back to me, her shoulders giving tiny uncontrollable heaves, the kitchen alive with the mint leaves she tore into bits and let flutter into the sauce.

"Maybe I've lost my mind," I thought out loud.

"Maybe?" Luna cried as if there were not a doubt.

"Perry suggested I take it out on my work."

"Screw Perry!"

I tried to explain. "I'm building an aviary."

Spinning around, she took the glass casserole and flung it to the floor, brandy and orange juice everywhere. I stood up, saying, "Luna," and she turned away again.

The truth is that after talking to Perry for a day I had started to believe it wasn't actually the marriage. I loved Luna. It seemed there was some more fundamental ruckus of the soul going on. As soon as the aviary entered my mind, I knew it had to be built, as if the project were a congenital looniness to be followed through at all costs. Everything that had slowly ushered in this little epiphany, the fighting and longings and conflicts of cosmology Luna and I were having, all these were mere symptoms. The real ailment had now erupted to the surface, inexplicable a thing as it may have been.

"A what?" Luna exclaimed.

"An aviary," I said.

"An aviary."

"Yes."

"Why?" She had turned to me now.

"Don't know, exactly. Feel it in my gut."

"The eagle," she said, a glimmer of understanding.

"The eagle," I said.

"You can't cage that thing."

"I'm not going to. I'm building an aviary."

She stared at me, the tears gone. "You need help."

She said that with such love I couldn't be sure how she meant it.

Birdhouse, birdsong, birdbath, birdcage, birdbrain, bird-dog, birds and bees, bird in hand, bird of paradise, of passage, of ill-omen, birds of a feather, kill two birds, Birdman of Alcatraz, Birdland, Hitchcock's birds, William Byrd?

At night, alone in a jumble of quilts and blankets (Luna slumbering in self-imposed exile downstairs) with the high winds singing against the bedroom window, I fret about the aviary. I've fallen victim to compulsion, of that there seems little doubt. Perry calls it a transitional creative episode. Luna still suspects a marital crisis, and if it is not, it is provoking one. She becomes more irritable by the day, goes around the house breaking things, perhaps in answer to my own creative inclinations. Meanwhile at night I dream of birds being beaten against the window by bursting gales as if by a sadistic child, their clicking beaks pressed to the glass, their pebbly terrified eyes imploring rescue. Of the blankets fluttering around me with the palpitations of wings from birds I find littering the bed like vermin. One morning I wake up downstairs, on the floor propped up at the foot of Luna's bed in the spare room, cowled in a woolen blanket stripped from her array of bedthings. I leave before she sees me there.

She finds me in the living room, entranced by Allegri's Miserere. After making coffee, she demands to know the purport of the aviary.

"What does it mean?"

"Mean?" I ask.

"What's the object of it?"

"Object?"

"What will the thing say to people?"

It hadn't really occurred to me that people would require it say something. I hadn't actually imagined it as public. But of course it will be. A big crazy birdhouse in our backyard would bring a phalanx of observers, lined up for confrontation, demanding as Luna does now an explanation. This is what I tell her.

The aviary is to be thirty feet long, fifteen feet wide, twenty feet high. It will not be used to cage eagles, or other birds of prey for that matter. Materials will include fencepoles, copper plumbing pipe and chain link firstly, as well as old bed frames, ductwork, abandoned farm equipment, chunks of automobile, twists of aluminum siding. Also I will work extensively in wood for the first time, as the nature of birds requires this, and have enlisted Perry to help haul the remains of several large trees to the workshop, where I will smooth and carve and embellish them, to stand them in the aviary as perches. Other living trees will be enclosed upon erection (saplings, too, may be necessary in the end, and will ensure the aviary has the potential for growth and change). After rustproofing, the whole enclosure will be painted with bright and rich colours: poppy, marigold, parrot, lapis lazuli, mulberry, canary yellow. Birdbaths and reservoirs will be set out, as well as an assortment of water droppers, feeders, seed trays. The whole will be catproofed (an eye here to his majesty), the chain link requiring entrance from on high. I haven't thought much farther than this, I tell her. Meanings have always been slippery things to me, grant applications and such forbidding.

I don't really have an explanation for her.

"Sometimes," I say, quoting Perry quoting Freud, "a cigar is just a cigar."

Luna stares in disbelief. The treble lines of the Allegri soar almost beyond the music itself to a transcendent high C.

"Listen," I say. "Castrati might have sung those notes hundreds of years ago. People do all sorts of things in the name of art. Am I being that terrible?"

She screams and leaves the room.

As it turns out, she leaves the farm, too. She's taken refuge at our neighbour Findlay's place, Ma Findlay relaying the information that Luna doesn't feel like talking to me, looking at me, listening to me. And who can blame her? says the old farm lady, with a goddamned fool husband like me ruining her life. I suppose I've had that coming. Still, after her daily and forthright rulings on the matter, Ma Findlay is partly sympathetic in her old-time way, bringing me biscuits and rhubarb relish, and checking up on me in the secret hope, I suspect, that she'll find my near-dead body in the pick-up parked in a sealed garage, surrounded by the viatica of self-inflicted death (sad notes, drained mickeys, pill packets). There's not much excitement on these farms and who can blame the inhabitants for savouring a little gossip and scandal, for dreaming they'll stumble upon some misguided wretch just in the nick of time, call the doctor, be the hero. Each time Ma Findlay pops her silvery head in the door and finds me alive, or steps into the workshop to see I haven't cut myself in half with the table saw, her heart might sink a little. I hate to disappoint her. So I tell her how I miss Luna terribly, how all I want is for her to come back. It's the truth, and it pleases Ma Findlay to no end. "She'll come back when she's good and ready," she says, "if you're lucky," and shoves another basket of biscuits my way.

Perry says he doesn't want to be an alarmist, but you never know with women, he says. They can get an idea in their heads, and that's it, they're like a pit bull on a baby. No getting them off it till they're done. By the time Luna's done at Findlay's it may be too late, he says. Deep down, I don't believe that, and I don't think Perry does either. I still take time off from the aviary to make a peace offering, a gift, and Perry helps, too. It's Rudy the cat, of course, done up in black metal and grey ceramic, all looping tail and Egyptian eyes, not something I would have chosen to do. Luna's had to leave the real Rudy with me, on account of Findlay's dog, Jake, who can't abide cats (and who can blame you, dear, toothy Jake?). Perry serves as the messenger, getting word of the sculpture to Luna, since I can't say I trust Ma Findlay to do it right. I've planted the sculpture on the lawn, as we've done with others, as Perry has done with his dragons and things. The metal and ceramic Rudy is visible from the road, set at the front of the house like a giant sentinel mouse-killer. Every once in a while, I peek out a front window to see if Luna has wandered over, if she is driving by, to catch a glimpse of the offering. But if she has done so, I've missed it. A week goes by without a glimpse. That Perry could be right, that it could be too late--it crosses my mind each time I take a moment to peek up the road, and see nothing but the potato fields and an empty strip of grey asphalt, the cat, the metal one, looking out there, too, and waiting.

I've made a lot of things over the years. Perry and I earn our money from the menagerie of doodads, pots and metalworks we make for the tourists, passersby, and exporters (who hawk our wares in craft shops across the country). Perry has his creatures, the odd fairy tale creations that inhabit his yard. He has a path made of glazed stones going nowhere, just a lash of colour embedded in the lawn, avenue to some other world. There's a gingerbread house made for his daughter who visits each summer, the building complete with concealed winking witch, a work that has nothing to do with his divorce, he'll tell you. I've got my barnhangings, my cubistic windmill, my Klee-like metal eruptions smiling at the neighbours who drive by my own farm. The house and outbuildings are overgrown with scrapshapes, ironworks, curios, stuff. We're not always sure why we make these things. There's an aspect of being born to it. Not why we make them; more, could we not make them. But the aviary is something altogether new. I know it, Perry knows it, Luna knows it.

Perry comes to watch and help. He sits on a tractor seat I've converted to a chair, his back against the workshop wall, his clay-spattered boots propped on an overturned rain-barrel. He sips on a glass of raspberry cordial cut with mineral water, and between bites of a sandwich asks me questions, such as, "What about lightning?"

"What about lightning?" I repeat.

"All this metal rising up, twenty feet high," says Perry. "like a lightning rod."

"You think so?" I say. For the first time my resolve to build the aviary is given a disturbing nudge as the world of weather impinges on the world of art.

"Be a question for an engineer or architect, I guess," Perry replies. "Don't know enough myself. Mysterious thing, though. They talk about it having a finger in the creation of life on earth, you know. The formation of the right organic chemicals, amino acids and such. Understand lightning, and you might understand creation."

"Big thoughts."

"Big subject, science."

"You figure I'm into a mad scientist thing?"

"Could be you're just building a birdhouse."

And so on, through the welding and cutting and fitting and forging of the aviary.

"Magritte," says Perry, "would put eggs not birds in the cage."

"I am not Magritte."

"No, you're not. Roast chickens, maybe."

"No."

"Small delinquent children."

All of a sudden Luna is standing in the doorway, three cold lagers in hand, prettier than a roaring fire to a frostbit dog. It's been three weeks since I've I seen her, since the castrati incident and her angry flight from home. I nearly cut my thumb off for joy.

"If I had my way," she says, "I'd put you both in the damn cage and swallow the key."

I'm afraid to move. Perry speaks.

"Following his bliss, like," he explains of me with a grin.

Luna pops open one of the beers, hands it to Perry.

"My ass," she says, but smiles nonetheless. She comes over to me, runs a hand up the back of my neck into my hair. "He's nuts. I'll find an ear under my pillow next."

"Or a wing," Perry says.

They both laugh.

But the aviary feels right. I am sticking to my guns.

"The crane is here," Luna says from the top of the cellar stairs. For a brief moment I think she is speaking of an animal, a great grey bird tall as a six-year old child, on a fence stump out back, or performing its strange courtship dance in our yard while I emerge from the cellar, the lunatic St. Francis of Assisi come offering friendship, Dr. Doolittling my way across the lawn. But of course it is the machine Luna means, here to put the roof on the aviary.

"Almost done," she says as I meet her on the stairs. Her tone suggests some kind of test. That is not far off the mark, I decide.

"Almost," I say squeezing her shoulder.

"I want you back," she says. "You got me back. I want you." Looking into her eyes, I see the traumata of recent months, the fragility of the marriage hovering in the worried blue, my own wife infirm with fear and I have a hard time acknowledging my responsibility for this. Mad scientist's wife syndrome is what she has. If she asked right now, I would abandon the project instantly, near completion as it is.

"It's not you, Luna," I say, and try to impart some faith in this with the pressure of my hands on her small arms. Then I go out to meet the crane, Perry attendant beside the machine, the sun high and showering the fields with golden light, the two workmen like two gruff and absurd altar boys awaiting our ministrations.

"Bring 'er round back," I decree.

"I like it," she says, her eye, perhaps, on the two bluejays nibbling from a hanging feeder.

"Me too," I say, and we return to the house.

Luna has prepared a dinner, a kind of celebratory meal, a gift for my finishing the aviary, and we've invited Perry, of course, since he's had a hand in it all.

Perry brings his own gift. It's a relief in clay, sand, and robin's bone of Icarus plunging from the sky. Indifferent farmers go dumbly about their work in the foreground, a scenario lifted from Breughel. Even Luna laughs. Perry points out that according to myth, Daedalus also dreamed up the potter's wheel. The coincidence of it all, he exclaims, was too strong to resist. The interference of art with life impossible to ignore.

And I thought I was building a sanctuary, a spa for the feathered tribes. I haven't become reckless with the exhilaration of flight. That's not what I've been up to.