| As the light faded from the sky, the
birds' inner clocks ran down and they settled themselves to
roost. The Rochester handlers serviced the baskets, freshening
the water and renewing the grain. Dickens pecked at a bit of it, fretting over the loss of his mate and chicks. He sensed, rather than remembered, other separations in the past. They were lonely passages best lived through quietly and then forgotten. He rested, murmuring to himself to soothe his heart. I found little to soothe my own heart. I understood very little of the conversation I overheard between the family doctor and my parents. I sat in the corner of the waiting room feeling lost and unreal, wanting to cry but afraid to do so. My mother seemed as calm as ever, but I noticed that her fingers plucked at the lapels on her coat and there were little x's of concern between her eyes that suddenly made her look much older. My father, too, seemed older, standing taller than the doctor and my mother, head bent listening in the serious way that was familiar to me. In many ways my father was older than my grandfather, tending to worry more and smile less. Was it at the two ends of life that things were simplest; most joyous. Doctor Sand murmured of clots and insults to the brain, of subdural and extradural hemorrhage. "Too soon to make a diagnosis. Too soon to tell," was the clearest of what the doctor said. Mysteries of words to me. All I was certain of was the fact that my grandfather had suffered some outrage to his dignity and health called a stroke. Da was greatly changed. Threatened. He'd fallen on the floor and had lain there all twisted, imploring forgiveness with his eyes. Now he was lying in a strange bed and that bothered me most of all. I was certain that Da hated that. My grandfather had always made much of the pleasure of sleeping in one's own bed. He'd spent some years rocketing about the country, finding cold comfort usually in unfamiliar nests. He said, "If anything marked a civilized man who'd earned his content it was the right and privilege to put his head down in the bed he'd grown fond of or, at least, used to." A bed was a most important attribute of a home that gave everyone a center to their lives. This is true of most creatures. I watched Dickens growing aware of his nest. He was watched as, perhaps, no bird in history had ever been watched. I marveled quietly at the miracle of pigeon "milk," that extraordinary substance created in the crops of both male and female for the feeding of the young. Cream-colored particles of it, much like curd, could be seen occasionally sticking to the sides of the mouths of parents and nestlings. Dickens's tiny crop was so stuffed with the food, when first he began to feed, that it formed a ball very nearly as large as the rest of his body. From a tiny, weak creature with wet downy feathers, eyes closed, beak wide and blindly searching, Dickens grew, in four days, into a ball of fluff quite able to sit in the nest with his head held upright. From that time on, more and more hard small-grain millet, kafir, and wheat fed to the parents, found its way into the crops of the baby birds. On the sixth or seventh day, feathers, some of color, began to pierce the skin. Dickens and his nest mate passed from the ugliness of naked infancy to the ugliness of pinfeathers. When I gently placed a finger near Dickens, the bird would raise his feathers fiercely, in the manner of a porcupine, rear up, open his beak wide, and snap the points together with a sharp cracking sound that was quite frightening. "He wants to fight, Da," I cried out in delight. "There's heart and spirit in him," Da agreed. "He means to defend his home. He's learning to love it." He turned his head toward the house, then, as though he'd heard himself called. He smiled wryly. My mind was on other things. Dickens may have been learning the ways of pigeon affection. If so, he soon took it for granted. He apparently assumed that any pigeon passing by should feed him, as he begged food indiscriminately from one and all. The rebuffs he received taught him other facts of life and reality. He soon learned that in order to get what he wanted and needed he'd have to do more than shout for it. He began picking up grain in imitation of his elders and, by the fifth week of his life, was able to fend for himself. When he was no longer a squab he'd become a "squeaker," peeping in a loud voice for attention or when his nest mate pecked at him. The squeaking stopped in the seventh week. By that time his first molt had already begun. I handled Dickens often. The bird had grown unafraid, even seemed to welcome my touch. "Place his feet side by side," Da instructed. "Now hold them between the first and second finger of your hand. So." He placed Dickens gently into my waiting hand. "Now then, the wings are to be folded against his body. Easy. If he flutters, smooth his wings from front to back. Can your thumb reach so far around that it can hold the primary feathers?" I could scarcely manage that, but Da pretended that I accomplished it very well while holding on himself. "Now," he continued, "place your other hand beneath his breast. Just so, just so." He smiled down at me as I attentively followed the simple instructions. He taught my hands even as the bird was being taught their touch. "A bird's to be held firmly, but gently, considering its comfort, the way you should hold love or even life," Da said. And again he lifted his head, as though responding to his name, and smiled in that strange way that closed me out from memories and affairs I couldn't understand. It was only long after I was grown, when my father and I could speak of certain things as equals, more or less, that I came to understand such smiles and other expressions that sometimes lay upon my grandfather's face. The very lines that were spoken between us are printed on my memory, but I didn't understand certain small ironies. Nothing hidden or dramatic; such excesses were never part of our lives. It's just that I think Da smiled in that way when he spoke of love of home, and turned his head as though he were called, because he reckoned my grandmother, had she been alive to hear him spouting such pious homilies, would have taken a broom to him. My father told me that he'd been told by his mother, Jenny, that his father had been terribly hard to tie down. He'd liked the wandering ways of a salesman. The firm he worked for was large enough to cover New England and the eastern seaboard but not so large that it needed more than one representative, so Henri Baudoum had it all, moving his base every month or so from one territory to another. He met Jenny Austen in Rochester, courted her powerfully, in only seven meetings over the space of a year, and married her in 1894 when he was thirty-two and she nineteen. He placed her in this boarding house or that hotel and went off selling his fonts of Garamond Bold and Italic Lightface, having the best of both worlds, that of the securely married man and a footloose, fancy-free fellow as well. Jenny never made an issue of it. She did complain softly, from time to time, of the dreary succession of strange bedrooms in shabby surroundings, but when Henri insisted that there was no reason for her to choose the cheapest establishments she simply smiled and tucked the savings away in a little painted tin souvenir box from the 1876 Philadelphia World Exhibition. She stopped complaining altogether after the birth of Amelie. When they moved, she'd pack up the child's things with her own without complaint. She counted as furniture and possessions a rocking chair, a sewing basket, a quilt and some linens, some bits of china, a mirror, and a picture album. The infant had a doll. She continued quiet after the birth of my father two years later. They moved seven times in the next three years, until the last child, a daughter, Agethe, came along. Then she'd had enough. She demanded a home and showed the money she'd saved for a down payment on one. At least that's the way my grandmother told the story to my father. Admittedly, Da told one that was similar to time and circumstance but far different as far as the way things turned out. He took the position that his had been the dream for a house and his the steady, patient design of its acquisition. Whatever the truth of it, that was a turning point in their lives.  The house stood a short way from a stream that served it. Songbirds gathered among some willows and cottonwoods. An old shack, more than a tool shed but less than a barn, was off to the northeast, midway between the house and stream. Chickens could be raised there if the owners were of a mind. That's the way my father remembered it. Memories are like layers of wallpaper on a room, tear one away and the room is transformed though still essentially the same. Many people can live in it, only changing the paper. I bend off to the side and peer around the loft house hoping to see the rushing water of the stream and the river beyond it. Not there. Memory's not quite that powerful unless one closes one's eyes. I close mine. |
