When the dawn came up again, Dickens roused himself. Ducks were making a racket all around him, quarreling among themselves.
Among the reeds Claude Shipley and his son, Ray, were hunkered into a blind fashioned with skillful hands around their rowboat. They were good companions, taking their recreation and sport together since Ray'd been six or seven. Now he was ten and could fish and hunt with the patience of a man, settling himself beside a stream unmoving with rod and reel or squatting in a marsh waiting for ducks to rise on a wet morning.
Ray had his own shotgun, a light over and under, that he was able to use with better than average marksmanship. It rested across his knees. He glanced over at his father and smiled as they both felt their nerve ends tingling at the sound of the marshland coming to life.
Dickens was perched out on the limb of a willow burnt leafless in some old fire. He tried his wings and found the muscles of his breast and shoulder better than they'd been when freshly torn. Some good healing had taken place. The battering of the storm had taken its toll in energy, not in pain.
He cocked his head and looked up toward the sky. It was clear as a crystal pond, not a trace of cloud, swept clean by the storm, and that invigorated him, bringing back sharp memories of the brook that ran down to the Genesee. Little dots appeared a long way off in the blue. Tiny voices called in the morning air.
The few ducks that were using the marsh called out to their brethren. Dickens watched as the ducks came drifting down out of the sky. He was homesick and wanted the company of his own kind when he saw these birds all flocked together. He rose into the sky.
Ray and Claude saw the birds coming down out of the blue, quacking away. They scarcely noticed the pigeon flying up as though to meet the ducks. Claude tapped his son's shoulder, giving him the first shot.
Ray lifted the shotgun to his shoulder at the ducks as they came into range, just as Dickens spiraled to pass the edge of the flock, reaching for altitude in hopes that be could find his way to home. Ray fired one barrel. Scattered bits of fire flashed through Dickens's wing. He tottered in mid air and saw with horror that one of the mallards was gone limp, falling like a stone to splash into the reflecting water below.
There was a wetness along his side. He left a fragile bloody wake behind him as he flew off in a desperate effort to get beyond the range of death.
He flew despite the old injuries and the new wounds. He flew although there was nothing that presented itself to his eye or memory that gave him any clue that he was flying in the right direction.
Perhaps in that Da had been wrong, for Dickens flew toward the northeast, not on a beeline for Rochester it's true, but northeast all the same, led along by some tiny bell of instinct that rang in his head and heart. He progressed slowly but steadily along the path over Tennessee and Kentucky. When night began to fall he was almost at the border of Ohio, still very, very far from home.

Da was far from better. The little improvement that appeared so promising, when he'd managed to lift his arm and later speak that one intelligible sentence, seemed to fade away. The luster in his eye when he'd spoken, or listened, to Fouquet seemed to dim and he lay on his side staring out the window. I found him just so each time I went to see him to tell him that Dickens wasn't home. As Da's strength failed, my hopes that Dickens would come back, bolstered by my grandfather's spirit in me, began to weaken as well. Most of what I believed was linked to my grandfather's wisdom, hope, and strength, one way or another.
That night when Dickens was roosting nearly four hundred miles from home, my grandfather stared out into the dark, thinking thoughts I couldn't imagine, waiting for something I couldn't conceive.
I knew of death. It was no surprise to me, though in human terms it was largely a stranger. Animals had died in my view and birds in my hands, but the death of someone close had been an experience observed only from a distance. The very nearest I'd ever been was when Mr. Watkins, the oldest member of the Rochester Pigeon Club, passed away in his ninety seventh year. He'd been friendly to me in the vague way of the very old, patting me on the hand or head and staring into my face as though it were full of secrets he wished to know. His eyes, at first, had frightened me, for they were pale as a workshirt that had suffered too many washings, threatening to come all apart if touched or even looked at too hard. But soon enough I saw his eyes to be much as he was, simply gentle and fragile, short sighted because there was no need any longer to see too far.
I dressed in my Sunday suit to go to his funeral. Da had left that choice up to me, after first explaining that no one would think less of me if I didn't go to pay my respects to an ancient who was more acquaintance than friend but that Mr. Watkins's relatives would be pleased by such a gesture if I did go. It would lead them to feel that their old patriarch had lived his life, even making new young friends, right till the end.
I'd have gone in any case because I must admit to having had a certain natural curiosity and invited the opportunity to see a dead person up close.
There was nothing special to it. I suppose I was a touch afraid, for such stillness even in someone only asleep is, somehow, more than a little terrifying. I knelt on the prayer stool beside the coffin and bent my head over my folded hands in a prayer, the shortest that I knew. I looked up sharply at Mr. Watkins because I had the sudden feeling that he was watching me, but, of course, his eyes were closed, thinly waxen. I could see there was lip rouge on his mouth and that, perhaps, was the most disturbing thing about it as far as I was concerned. I felt that Mr. Watkins had been made a fool of and said so to my grandfather on the way home.
He laughed softly, as though pleased by something good I'd done. I later knew it was because he reckoned he had quite evidently helped to make me clear eyed and inpatient with fraud.
"Little attendances upon the dead, Hugh. Just some little touch to ease the harshness. Foolish in its way. You saw that."
"He should have had his own face to carry away with him," I said haltingly, trying, myself, to know what I meant even as I said it.
Da squeezed my shoulder.
"You'll see that I have my own face, won't you, Hugh?"
I started as though he'd struck me. He clamped his hand on my shoulder as we walked.
"My own face, my own suit on my back not a new one bought for the occasion and make sure they put shoes on my feet even if they can't be seen." He took his hand from my shoulder then and roughed my hair. "Listen to me putting burdens on a boy," he said.
"I'll see to it, Da," I said.
"One more thing," he said. "I was born in a bed at home. I saw my children born the same way. I want to die likewise. Strange cradles don't make comfortable biers."
So that was about all I knew of death until that time. I felt it outside among the trees and shadows as Da lay in bed and Dickens remained lost to me. In fact, I was certain by then that Dickens had met death and been touched by him after he told the shadow the way to my grandfather.
I couldn't know that he was still alive among the streets and alleys of the town where he was forced to roost with the coming of night.

Much of what the old teach the young seems to have a lot to do with responsibility, honor, and trust. The promise I so willingly gave to Da, though never thinking it would ever really be asked of me since Da would surely live forever, was not the only responsibility he'd ever placed upon me. There was the matter of the key to the small room in which we kept the wicker baskets, the feed and other gear concerned with the raising and racing of pigeons. It was kept locked not so much from fear of theft but inadvertent contamination of the seed grains we fed our pets. Da was always prudent and knew people were often thoughtless or careless.
Business was taking him away from home for a week or so, some convention of typesetters. He'd been asked to address them about the early days. The pigeons would be entirely in my care and I suppose Da wondered if it were too much responsibility to give to a nine year old.
He asked me into the parlor and said, "I have a little piece of advice for you, Hugh."
"What?" I asked, knowing he wanted me to attend him closely by the simple gravity of his manner.
"Never let anyone give you a key you don't want."
I suppose I frowned, not knowing what he meant.
"You can tell the amount of a man's concerns by the number of keys be carries," Da said "Never take one unless you mean to accept the responsibility that goes with it."
I understood then and nodded my head.
He handed me the key to the storeroom. It gleamed in the last light coming through the parlor window. I didn't touch it at first. I know it wasn't simply the key to a lock that protected a few sacks of feed and several woven baskets but a symbol of a share of manhood he was offering to me. There was an air of uncommon drama about the act.
I took the key.
It was later that I took the "key" of the ceremony surrounding my grandfather's death.
Reaching into my pocket now, I find that I've too many keys.