All the grain was removed from the
feeders in the baskets. No trainers wanted their birds flown with
heavy crops. Tests and observations had proved that there was no
special energy value in feeding soon before a race. It'd been
discovered that digestion slowed down, almost stopped, during the
rigors of flight. Full crops meant only extra weight. Water,
however, was left in the cups with bits of sponge so that, if the
water was spilled during the night, the sponges would hold enough
to keep the birds refreshed.
Dickens sat on
the dowel roost in the basket without anxiety or nervousness.
Even his excitement finally died in the deep of night and he
slept as pigeons sleep, with eyes open.
At first light a
new sense of expectancy aroused them all. An electricity of
competition passed among them. They shifted about within the
confines of the baskets, tried their wings, murmured and muttered
to themselves, wanting to be off and flying in the morning
air.
Dickens was in
prime condition. Not one tail or flight feather was missing or
broken. His plumage was oily, silky to the touch. A white bloom
was on it.
Just under the
skin upon the keelbone a little clot of blood pulsated, the
notable mark of a bird in the very top of its form. Dickens was a
champion trained and tuned to the moment.
The race
committee of the Hillsboro Racing Pigeon Union walked the line of
benches as the baskets were set out by other members. The
selected men from Rochester, who'd traveled with the birds,
walked along with them.
The sun rose
above a distant stand of trees, feathering the edges of the
massed leaves in cool light. A solar breeze swept across the
land. It was sweet to the tongue and freshened the minds of birds
and men alike.
The baskets were
opened, the birds released into the luminous morning. The time
was marked by the hands of a "perfect" clock. Four
hundred and twenty-six birds rushed into the sky. They climbed
above the height of the tallest tree and formed into kits.
When pigeons
fly, they seek the company of others of their kind. This
attraction is powerful and natural. The trainer must find ways to
break his birds of the habit, for a fast bird is often caught up
by the flock pull, and time is wasted. Some remain with a kit of
slower birds all the way and lose races they might have won with
ease if flown alone.
The ideal bird
finds the heights, ignores the flock and kits, takes its
bearings, and chooses the most direct airline to home. Dickens
was one of these. He soared high above the other birds, climbing
like a dart. With powerful beats of his wings, an air of
exaltation, he answered the demands of his will to go home. He
raced toward Rochester. All the training and purpose of his life
had come together in the driving moment.
Dickens had been
early bred so his training hadn't begun until he was nearly
into his eighth week.
I'd held
Dickens so that his head faced my forearm, settled in my hand
without cramping or undue restraint. Da carried the nest mate,
Scrooge, named for the habit it had of squinting up its eyes in
mean and suspicious contemplation.
Three wicker
baskets filled with other young birds were lined up on the bed of
my red wagon. We were off on the first training flight only a
short walk away, about five blocks to the empty lot on the corner
of Peach and Waverly.
Da's trips
were well known along the route, a mark of early summer as
dependable as the flowering of the fringe trees and dogwoods I do
suppose.
"This," Da said, as we strolled along, holding our pets
and pulling the wagon behind us, "is the beginning of
Dickens's responsibility to himself."
"What do
you mean, Da?"
"Well,
he's had nothing but his freedom. That's a good thing to
have, but some creatures some people don't really know what
it is."
"What is
it?"
"What do
you think?" Da asked.
I thought about
it for the length of a dozen strides.
"Now
don't go dwelling on it and saying what you think is proper
or pleasing, Hugh. Say right out."
"Freedom's to do what you want?"
"Any
time?"
"I
think."
"As long as
you please?"
I nodded.
"Without
caring?"
"Caring
about what?"
"Making
your bread, earning your keep, doing those things you've been
set to do in company with other people."
"Chores?
You mean chores, Da?"
"Keeping
and caring," Da nodded. "Doing what you've been
given to do when you're able. Making your own way."
"I'm
too small yet to make my own way, Da," I said.
"Indeed,
but small as he is, Dickens runs on pigeon time and he's to
be taught something of freedom now."
"We want
him to fly to the loft, don't we?" I cried out, suddenly
afraid that I would lose my pet. "You don't expect him
to fly away and leave?"
"It could
happen has happened but I think not. We've made him
comfortable. He knows your touch. But even if we knew that
he'd fly away forever we'd have to test his will to come
home all the same. It's one mark of freedom. A creature
returns to home for the good that's in it. For the caring and
the rightness. Every creature has to be given the right to chase
the far reaches of the sky, find the limits and accept them
gracefully. Frogs make foolish bulls no matter how much they huff
and puff and swell themselves up."
"Did you
look for the reaches of the sky, Da?" I asked.
He smiled softly
and looked off with his sailor's eyes. His voice was soft and
graveled with emotion. He spoke to somebody else, not me.
Somebody who wasn't really there.
"Fifty is a
trying time for men. Young women call you "sir" and
kiss you on the corner of the mouth but don't try to linger
there. They sometimes hug you for a while longer than they
should. But it's as though it's for the young man that
you were."
"Women are
like that," I said, thinking of Aunt Tassy and her friend,
besides any number of other female relatives and acquaintances
who had a habit of holding me close till I feared I'd smother
against their bosoms. I was pretty clear about what Da meant.
He smiled down
on me.
"Yes,
well," he said. "Bothersome creatures they are.
"You'd
never believe it at the moment but there'll come a time when
the loss of such pleasures, and others that you'll learn
about in time, leaves you feeling kind of sad. Makes you feel
some joy has gone from life. Wakes the gadling in a
man."
"Did you
want to fly off to the reaches of the sky again?"
"Indeed. I
was fifty-three and fighting the sadness that half a century had
laid on me, your aunts married and gone away, your pa new married
and set up in a house of his own. I had my work, of course. But
the house was gloomy Saturday afternoons and Sundays. There was
nothing much for me to do. Your grandmother had a nest box made
and gave me a pair of pigeons for occupation."
"That was
nice."
"I suppose,
but I resented it. I took a leave from the newspaper. I had one
more try at the other side of the mountain."
"But you
came back."
"Lickety-split. My bones were aching from sleeping rough on
the ground or in strange beds. It wasn't for me anymore. I
was domesticated and loved my nest. I was like a pigeon, free to
fly away but content to stay at home. I tried to leave.
That's how come I can talk so foolish and so certain about
such things."
We reached the
grassy lot, knee high to Da, nearly waist high on me. It was
filled with green foxtail, curly dock, and quack grass. Here and
there red sorrel sent up its crimson spikes, ox-eye daisy made
pretty and dandelion blossomed buttergold. Little gnats and tiny
moths whirled about in the pollen dust kicked up by our
passage.
In the center of
the small field the baskets were opened and the birds released.
Dickens and Scrooge were tossed from our hands. They joined
together in a flock, just a touch confused and edgy, chattering
among themselves concerning their whereabouts until one or
another got the right of it and started back to the loft.
"There they
go, " Da said," like a bunch of noisy kids going home
from school. Wanting company all the way. We'll be changing
that."
We walked back
to the loft, rested awhile and handled the birds, then put them
in the baskets again for another walk back to the corner of Peach
and Waverly.
The second time
we tossed the birds individually, five minutes apart, so they
wouldn't kit up and wait for other birds before making for
the loft.
The following
morning we'd walked out about a mile to the top of a hill,
sent the birds off all together, then one at a time as before,
lengthening the distance of flight, trusting to the love of loft
and nest bred into the birds to see them safely home. We walked a
lot those years.
Now Da lay
trapped in a body that would not respond to his will. He was
incontinent from time to time. I wonder what terrible humiliation
that must have been to him. I'd sometimes overheard him
speaking of death with older men, with Fouquet and others of his
age. They'd all come to some bargain with the inevitability
of it. They talked at length only about the manner of it; which
deaths were preferable. All agreed that they feared any disease
or dysfunction that would strip from them the means to stand in
the presence of the Reaper, composed if not entirely unafraid. It
seemed to me to be morbid talk, vaguely shivery like a
witch's tale. When Da saw me listening in, he'd quickly
turn the subject away, not because he thought children
shouldn't know of death but because he didn't choose to
have me know that he was so much concerned by the prospect of
it.
I'm certain
that the efficient and casual way in which he was handled in the
hospital terrified and enraged him.
He was as
helpless as a baby, unable to make his wants known except by the
most exhausting effort of will. He was then accused of being
difficult; of resisting all the good they wished to do him. At
times he was discussed by the professionals as though be
couldn't hear, an infant to be managed instead of a grown man
to be consulted.
I'm sure he
concentrated on the world available to him, trying to define that
much of it which he could hope to control in some way. Anything
outside the hospital was out of reach. Indeed, anything outside
the room in which he was imprisoned went on its way without heed
of him, except for a portion of the sky.
I'd propped
his head on the pillows to one side so that he might take what
hope or joy he could from the reaches of the sky. I was deeply
involved in an act of loving, uncaring of practical concerns.
I'd intuited that Da wanted at least that much of freedom. I
gave him the small public park on the other side of the broad
road that led to the hospital. From his angle of view Da could
see a kite soaring below the clouds; could follow the string
along its bellied path toward the earth but probably couldn't
see below the sill to the end of it. Did he wonder who held it
tethered to the ground?
Without a human
being, visible and real, Da hadn't much trust in things
standing alone as marks or symbols. Things had no existence as
far as my grandfather was concerned, despite the fact that his
poet's consciousness often dealt with myth and metaphor. He
often spoke to me in parables. I think be felt himself, without
undue conceit, a philosopher in the mold of Robert Frost or Carl
Sandburg, simple, homely, and unpretentious. The little verses he
sometimes composed for me spoke of landscapes but sang of barns
and fences as well, objects touched by the hand of man.
He told me once
of coming home that last time, an aging boy, a weary gadling,
hungry for the nest. He'd waited till he was alone, Jenny
gone to quietly prepare a homecoming meal, before walking around
the little house beside the river touching things, making them
real. The rocking chair, a table beside a wing-back, another by
the fire displaying small bits of china in the shapes of dogs and
cats, the very floors and walls.
Bird talk
murmured up on the river breezes. He went out into the yard and
walked down to the shed, a shed no more.
It had been
painted white, its roof tiled in blue. A small steeple had been
added to it topped by a weathervane of three birds in silbouette
rising from a marshland. There were a dozen pigeons or more
strutting and pouting about on a small porch before the nest box
doors.
Jenny came down
to stand with him.
"Pretty,
aren't they," she'd said.
"I thought
you were fondest of your singmg canary," Da'd
replied.
"Petey
can't be let out of the cage. These birds can and must be set
free from time to time. But they rarely fly off and not come
home."
"Are you
telling me something?"
She'd kissed
him on his cheek and laughed. The laughter Da said was very young
and very wise.
When I came into
the room at my grandfather's back, a sound burst from his
lips that sounded to me like a cry of anguish. I ran around to
the other side of the bed, looked into his face and saw with
relief that he was really trying to laugh at some happy thought.
I laughed a little too.
"Watching
the kite, Da?" I asked.
He raised his
right hand a little and clucked softly in his throat. Bird
talk.
"I
understand, Da," I said. "The birds were tossed at half
past six this morning. The winds were light and southeasterly in
a clear sky.
Da said,
"It won't be long now and you'll have yourself a
Concourse winner."
It didn't
come out that way. Not at all. It came out a long series of
garbled syllables, evil-sounding and ugly. Even as he tried to
speak, Da tried to call back the sounds. I suppose he saw a
subtle look of shock and pain on my face, though I tried to hide
it. But the spate of his words wouldn't be stemmed; his
tongue ran on uncontrolled, trying of its own volition to
complete the thought and make itself understood, a treasonous
organ of speech running wild and humiliating him. He closed his
eyes against the shame of it.
I grabbed his
hand hard and went down on my knees beside the bed.
"Oh,
Da," I said, "you just got to stay with me. You just
can't go away and get lost."
Da made a
choking sound that rose into his mouth. He opened his eyes again
and peered into my face.
"You have
to be here for the end of the race, " I said as though this
was a proper bargain to be struck with God.
God's world
went on.
Last year's
leaves, uncovered by the warm, thawing days of spring, dried out,
fragile as tissue paper, light as floss, were swept up from the
streets of Sault Sainte Marie in Michigan, from the glades and
forests surrounding, and deposited into the Soo Canals.
The winds blew
moderate to fresh, twelve to twenty miles an hour, gusting
occasionally. They gave a pleasant spice to the air, a hint of
rain. White clouds rolled high above. The winds danced across
Lake Huron on the way to meet a chill mass of polar air moving
down from the north.
In another part
of the sky a peregrine falcon sailed at one thousand feet above
the valley of the Wabash just south of Terre Haute, Indiana. She
and the tercel that was her mate defended a territory of nearly
eight square miles across the gently rolling hills, river bottom,
and thick stands of poplar dotted here and there. She soared up
on the rising thermals, altering the pitch of her wings to ride
the winds.
Migrant birds,
passerines of all sorts, would have done well to cross her domain
when she was on the nest, perched after satiating herself upon a
kill or preening in the quiet hours of the day. Once aloft and on
the hunt, noiselessly riding the reaches of the sky, she was a
terror. She examined every foot of the width and length and depth
of her nation, alert for prey.
After two hours
of flight from the beginning of the race, Dickens entered her
kingdom.
The sun is
lowering in the sky, just disappearing beyond the apartment
block, and a breeze with some hint of chill in it seems to rise
immediately from the land.
The reverie that
fills me, the fragmented thoughts that occupy my mind, dashing me
back and forth across the years as though I had no will of my
own, is a rich tapestry. I can feel myself a six year old boy
again with my very first pigeon that was my own and no
other's under my hands, an older boy of ten suffering the
helplessness I felt before my grandfather's terrible illness,
a youth of fourteen at the funeral of a woman who had a blue
glass eye. All of these and more. A different youth, young man,
adult for each of the years of my life. At least for every one of
the small epochs that attend our journey there to here to
somewhere.
I am suddenly
shaken by a terrible regret that I had no children and, because
of that, lack a grandchild preferably a boy with whom I might
share my thoughts and feelings as once Da shared them with me.
Not because it would be expected that grown up concerns would be
understood or remedies to trouble advised, but simply because it
would be flesh of my flesh listening to the sad song of
life's passage that is so much sadder when there is no flesh
of one's flesh to listen.
I'm certain
that my grandfather must have looked upon me as a small bundle of
his own blood and bone more than half a century removed, himself
reborn to wonder at the marvels of the world, my eyes his, my
ears his, my tongue upon the first sweet apple his as well. I
must have seemed to him a solemn repository of Henri
Baudoum's better tales, verses, fables; his wisdom and hard
earned knowledge. A well that he was filling even if it did not
completely understand, and that would, in good time, give it back
to another Baudoum along the line. I've failed him in that
regard, but not in the sharpness of my recall which is its own
special dedication and tribute.
