| My gift was a peach pit Da had carved
into the strangely amusing shape of two monkeys sitting face to
face. Kissing, if monkeys kiss. Da insisted that they did. It had
been given me as a kind of trophy for a race that was lost. The
first one Dickens ever flew. Before setting my bird out against that first challenge, we'd mated him. I was so familiar with the process that one would imagine it should seem commonplace to me, but I never lost my wonder at the visible demonstration of falling in love evidenced by the birds. Perhaps that was because Da, who was so much older than I, had quite clearly never lost his wonder of it and made my senses more attuned to the marvel. Dickens, like other pigeons, had left the nest when he was about five weeks old, not because be wanted to but because hunger tricked him. Angel had come to feed his offspring less and less. Spotting him near the nest and eager for a meal, both Dickens and Scrooge tried to reach him, tumbled from the nest for the first time, flapped their wings, and did, in a manner of speaking, complete their first flight. For a few nights they continued to roost in their old nest box with the adults, but as soon as they'd learned to forage for themselves we removed them both and placed them with other young bachelors in a separate loft. Cock pigeons are an aggressive bunch, bold and always ready to accept a challenge over territorial rights. They walk about like schoolboys with chips on their shoulders daring other birds to knock them off. Dickens was bigger, brasher, more aggressive than any of his mates and had become, perhaps, a bit of a bully. Only his nest mate, Scrooge, never tired of presenting himself for a quarrel. Then there'd be much wing-flapping, pecking, and significant cooing until Scrooge did, at last, back off. The hens are made of gentler stuff as seems usual among the majority of God's creations, though they are often fiercer in their defense of the young. We had one pigeon, fragile, nearly white, with a pearly eye, delicate as a china cup who, wounded and bleeding, yet fought off the attack of a raiding possum which had come to take her chicks. It was she, Thalia, named for the muse of pastoral poetry, meaning "the blooming one" my grandfather told me who had lost her mate through mischance and which we chose to become Dickens's wife if she'd have him. She was older than Dickens by two years. "And wiser, " Da said. "Dickens is too big for his breeches, lording it over his loft mates the way be does." I didn't know whether I should feel shame or pride that my bird was the unchallenged master of his territory. Pride, I think, won out, and Da knew it. So perhaps Dickens's lesson was mine as well. We introduced them to one another and stepped away for the sake of their privacy. Dickens walked around Thalia several times and began his mating dance. He spread his wings and dragged his tail to show his form to best advantage. The widow cocked an eye at him, measuring him, determining his ardor, listening to his murmured promises. She was not a young maiden easily seduced by any passing suitor, but a matron of some maturity who clearly meant to take and keep the upper hand. It was some time before she surrendered, but when she did, it was done in so expert and sweetly aggressive a manner that we laughed, Da and I, as Dickens scrambled away in confusion. When their marriage was consummated, Dickens hurried off to find them a home as Thalia walked delicately around the porch sunning herself and softly blinking her eyes. He bustled about, eyeing this half-shadowed nest box or that unoccupied one washed by the sun. He made the choice of one discreetly located, entered it, announced his possession, then called out loudly to his wife that she should come and approve his selection. He crouched in the new home, shaking his wing tips as he awaited her arrival. She came with some display of eagerness, looked over the dwelling, and walked away. It's a rare thing for a female not to accept the nest site chosen by the male. But Thalia had a nest box of her own and apparently she wanted no change of domicile. Gently, ever careful of his pride and dignity, she led him to her home and offered it to him. Dickens resisted for a while but finally, in a flurry of activity, he threw out the material of her nest and went out to seek fresh sticks and straw and leaves. Thalia selected what she wanted of the pile that he gathered, turning and twisting slowly, piling it around her body until the nest was built. She laid her clutch of eggs ten days after the mating, driven to the nest by frequent peckings delivered by Dickens whose instincts told him that it was time for the laying. They sat the eggs and, in proper time, the young squabs were born. When they were eight days old, we took Dickens from the nest box and placed him in the basket. He was entered in a race of three hundred miles, his first. Da might have held him for longer races right from the beginning, but I think he realized how eager I was to have Dickens tested against the clock and other racers. I can't be sure if that was the reason for Dickens's loss. There are a few rare birds that fly as well at all distances, but apparently Dickens was for the long race alone. The three-hundred-miler ended in disappointment for me. Dickens arrived well behind the leaders, at a speed which wouldn't have been agreeable even in a far less promising bird. I was foolish about it, pouting and a little angry with my pet. Da came down from the lofts to where I sat by the stream looking at the icy waters carrying autumn leaves away. He sat down quietly beside me, never suggesting that I might be cold sitting on the ground that way, allowing me for the moment to be as heavy with my disappointment as I wished to be. He held a jackknife in one hand and a dried peach pit in the other. The blade made a thin scraping noise on the nut. A smell rose from it that was delicious and somehow mysterious. I finally looked to see what he was about. "Dickens didn't do well," Da said. "No," I replied, hearing the harshness in my own voice. "Had high hopes for winning, didn't you?" "Yes," I said less harshly. "He let you down." "Yes," I said. Da was quiet for a while, giving his attention to the little carving in his hand. "Did he have a right to let you down?" he asked all at once. "What do you mean?" I asked, startled at the question, not really understanding it. "Did he do it deliberatelyi" "Never," I said. "Did he do his best, do you think?" "Yes," I said after a time. "Have we done our best for him?" "We could always do better," I said, for that was the thing Da always said about nearly any job that didn't come off exactly right. "How?" "I don't know." "What don't you know?" "What went wrong. Why Dickens lost." "We'll send him out in training over and over again until we find out why he didn't come straight to home. Even then, " Da said, "we may never know. You've got to accept the fact that life is filled with little mysteries." I was watching when he cut his eyes at me to see if I was attending the lesson. He laughed when I caught him at it and I laughed too. "And disappointments too," I said. "Indeed. " He examined the carving in his hand and found it good, for he closed the knife and put it in his pocket. He rubbed the fruit stone on his sweater. "So what's the only thing you've really lost so far, since you've still got Dickens in the loft ready to try again?" "Just a trophy," I said. He grinned and pressed the peach pit into my hand. "And now you've got one of those. This is for you and Dickens. Win or lose, he finished the race." So, many months later, I took that little trophy of a race that was worthy because completed and put it back into my grandfather's hand from where it had come. He glanced at it and tried to smile. "Hey, Da," I said and could say no more for a while.  Holding it to my lips I can still smell the faint odor of peach, or imagine that I do. A summer smell. And that, in turn, recalls a day in summer when Da and I decided to dam up a portion of the stream below the house and make a swimming hole, or at least a wading pond, of a portion of it. Even the most fanatic fanciers couldn't occupy themselves with pigeons every spare hour of the day. Especially those long hours of June, July, and August. We searched along the banks of the stream among the trees for rocks of sufficient size to make a base for our dam. Together we spent two hours digging out a boulder that seemed wedded to the center of the earth and rolling it to the side of the rushing stream. We looked at one another, eyes sparkling, holding laughter in our mouths and bellies in anticipation of the wonderful splash that was coming. Then we pushed that huge boulder all together, to see it slip down the bank side, gouging out its own path, balanced, refusing to roll over in a glorious rush. It settled like some dignified old dowager sitting into an easy chair, entering the water with scarcely a ripple. How we laughed at that. There were other rocks that responded better for us. We were wet nearly through long before there was anything that looked like a dam. Now we had only to wait until the stream filled up the basin behind it and overflowed the banks at that spot where they were lowest. A couple of hours should provide us with swimming depth. We went back inside to have a bite and wait. A summer storm arose, swift and without warning. The skies were black all at once and opened up a flood of rain. The stream grew even as we watched it from the shelter of the mud porch. A glut of last year's leaves, the limbs of trees, even a small log or two came tumbling down the torrent. The cloudburst tore apart our dam and, foolishly, we cheered because there was something glorious in the sight. We never did try to make another swimmmg hole. I can see now that our engineering was faulty. No such accommodation could have been created in the middle of the stream the way Da and I had gone about it. What we'd had was another day together. I wish I could have such a day again, some hours of foolish labor. I wish I could care enough to excavate some huge boulder and send it crashing, or even sliding gently, into some woodland stream. |
